Belle-Ile-en-Mer, Evening, Cote Sauvage 1909

"Belle-Ile-en-Mer, Evening, Cote Sauvage" by Maxime Maufra… looks like it’s been laid down with watercolour and maybe some kind of graphite stick. I can imagine Maufra out there on the rugged coast, trying to capture that fleeting moment as the evening light shifts over the sea. This picture feels like the start of something, a sketch or a study for a larger painting, maybe? I bet Maufra was wrestling with the wildness of the place and trying to get a handle on it. Look at the way he's scribbled those lines to suggest the rocks and the water. It's kind of a shorthand, right? He's not trying to copy nature exactly, but he is trying to get the feeling of it, the energy. I wonder if he was looking at other painters, like Monet perhaps, who was also obsessed with capturing light and atmosphere. Artists are always in conversation, borrowing and riffing off of one another's ideas. Painting is always such a mysterious process. You never really know where it's going to take you. It's like a dance between intention and accident, control and letting go.