The Sailing Ship 1939

Lyonel Feininger made this watercolor painting of a ship in 1939. The shapes are geometric and the colors are mostly lime green, with hits of crimson, black and grey. I'm thinking about Feininger and what it must have felt like to apply those washes to the paper. Did he allow for a bit of chaos, or was he very precise and controlled? It's interesting to see how he mapped out the ship with these angular lines. His use of color really sets a mood, a touch melancholic. The geometric forms create a feeling of movement, as if we are watching the ship navigating the waters. Thinking about the materiality of paint here, you know, the way the pigment settles into the fibers of the paper. Each stroke has a particular weight and presence. It is an act of translation from the world into a new visual language, like a poem, expressing something beyond the literal. And that’s what painters do. We’re all talking to each other across time.