Bloemmotieven op een geel fond Possibly 1918

Theo Colenbrander made this drawing, Bloemmotieven op een geel fond, with watercolour and pencil, and the marks are so light, they almost float off the page. I love to imagine the process of making this; a kind of searching, a soft wandering with the pencil line. He’s feeling his way through it, improvising like a jazz musician. The yellow ground hums, and these delicate floral shapes emerge, shifting between representation and abstraction. There’s something so joyful about the colour palette – yellow, green, grey, red – and the way he’s let the washes bleed into each other. I get the sense that Colenbrander was after something ephemeral, less about solid forms and more about capturing a fleeting moment of perception. He was clearly looking at nature, but not trying to copy it, instead he’s channelling its energy into these loose, playful gestures. It reminds me of some of the early modernists, like Kandinsky, who were also trying to find a visual language for inner experience. We can really see how artists throughout time are constantly building on each other's work, riffing off ideas, and pushing the boundaries of what painting can be.