The garden steps 1940

Pierre Bonnard made 'The Garden Steps' with oil paint and a whole lot of looking! It's all about how he applied the paint, these short jabs of colour building up the image. It's not about smooth blending, more about the energy of each mark. The texture is thick but not in a gloppy way, more like each brushstroke is a deliberate decision, a kind of thinking-through-painting. Look at those yellow marks down in the lower left, they are almost vibrating! You can feel how the painting is built up from the ground up, the steps leading the eye to that lone figure. Bonnard loved to obscure the view, never quite giving you the whole story. There's a similar way of working in Vuillard’s paintings, both using everyday life to make something really special. For Bonnard, painting wasn't about perfection, it was about the joy of seeing and the act of translating that onto canvas.