Blue Trees 1915 - 1916

Henry Lyman Saÿen’s canvas dives head-first into a world of feeling, rendered in strokes of pure, unadulterated color. Imagine the artist standing before the canvas, the brush loaded with pigment, each stroke a deliberate act of translation, turning the ordinary into something otherworldly. Those blue trees, they’re not just trees, right? They’re like veins, pulsing with a life force that defies the conventional. And that house, bathed in warm hues, it’s a haven, a retreat from the electric energy of the natural world. I bet he was thinking about Gauguin, how he took the world and turned it up-side down. It’s all about the doing; it's like the canvas is a site for something to come into being. I wonder, how the experience of making this painting altered the way that Saÿen saw. It is, perhaps, only through such acts of creative expression that we can begin to understand the true nature of our reality.