Paar 1912

Christian Rohlfs made this suggestive watercolour with broad, confident strokes, rendering a couple in simple washes of ochre, brown, and blue. I wonder what he was thinking as he made it. Did he stop and start a lot? You can feel the urgency of the black lines, like charcoal maybe, defining form and shadow with a kind of reckless abandon, but in control. What is the couple thinking? The man looms over the table, his presence a kind of cloud over the yellow dress of the lady. The relationship is captured in a moment of tension, a pause in a narrative we can only guess at. The painting feels contemporary, and there's a sense of kinship with the raw honesty of artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker. Painting is a site of inquiry; an embodied expression, inviting us to contemplate the ambiguities of human connection.