Woman with Parrot 1941

Fernand Léger made Woman with Parrot, at an unknown date, with ink and watercolour on paper. It's as if he's laying down how things look and feel, not so much what they ARE, but what happens in-between seeing and knowing. The colours are laid down in blocks, sometimes bleeding and mixing. There's a kind of dialogue between the washes of color and the sharp, graphic lines of the ink, like a conversation where some things are blurred and uncertain while others are sharply defined. Notice the solid circles of green. I love the way the mouth of the woman is coloured in and also one of her breasts, it's a kind of shorthand for a nipple! Léger's work reminds me a bit of Francis Picabia, both playing with form and representation in ways that question our assumptions about what art should be. It’s as if Léger invites us to consider that art is less about providing answers and more about embracing ambiguity.