Turkish Soldier 1913

Kazimir Malevich made "Turkish Soldier" with watercolor and pencil on paper. Look at how the edges of the red figure almost dissolve into the background. That’s the beauty of watercolor, its fluidity, and how it can be shaped by chance as much as intention. There's a ghostly quality here, like a memory or a dream. A flattened red figure with a spade for a head floats against a ground of blue waves, airplanes, a fish. I love the way Malevich balances the ethereal and the concrete. The wash of the watercolor creates a kind of atmosphere, while the pencil lines give the composition structure. The red line that bisects the picture plane is a grounding force. It’s like, is this a landscape, or an abstraction? Is it a painting, or a poem? Malevich, like Kandinsky, was a total mystic. "Turkish Soldier" reminds me of Paul Klee, in how it embraces childlike simplicity to ask profound questions about existence.