The Sailing Ship 1939

Lyonel Feininger made this watercolour and ink work, The Sailing Ship, in 1939. There's something so appealing about the way he’s built up the image with these transparent layers of colour and stark black lines, it’s like he’s feeling his way through the image. Look at the way the red and black bleed into each other, creating depth. The textures aren’t obscured; you can see where the brush has skipped across the surface of the paper. These marks reveal the process, and speak to the history of the work. Those intersecting lines, like shards of glass, cut across the whole image, creating a kind of dynamic tension. It's like he’s taken a Cubist approach to the image, abstracting it and breaking it down into planes. Feininger's angular style echoes something of the German Expressionists, who were exploring similar themes of fragmentation and uncertainty in the early 20th century. But, really, art is an ongoing conversation, each artist borrowing and riffing off the ideas of those who came before. I love that about art, it embraces ambiguity and welcomes multiple interpretations.