Landscape with a red animal 1913

This is Franz Marc’s Landscape with a Red Animal, made with watercolor and gouache. I love the flatness of the paint application, and the way the image is built up with a series of marks that sit right there on the surface, like a collage. There's this gorgeous layering of color and form that feels so immediate and intuitive. Look at how the blue wash of the sky meets the dry brushstrokes of the black tree trunks. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the paper, making decisions on the fly. There's a real sense of the materiality of the medium. The way the pink clouds are applied almost feels like a memory of Cubism. It's there, but it's been flattened out and made into a pure sensation. The loose approach is typical of Marc, who often used animals and landscapes as a way to explore the expressive possibilities of color and form. It almost reminds me of Arthur Dove. Both were invested in a kind of simplified, distilled vision of the world. Art is about seeing, thinking, and feeling, right? It's a conversation that never really ends.