Little Old Cottage, Egypt Lane, East Hampton 1917

Childe Hassam painted this small, domestic scene with oils on canvas. You can see the dabs and dashes of paint. It's so heavily worked! I can imagine Hassam, plein air, squinting at the light, then jabbing at the canvas, trying to capture that certain something. What do you think he was thinking? Perhaps about how the color of the house shifts in the light? How the textures blend—the shingled roof, the leafy vines, all made from the same energetic strokes? I sympathize, because you are always trying to catch that thing. The way he builds up the paint gives it a real tactile presence; the surface almost becomes a relief. Look at how the brushstrokes follow the form of the building, each one a little echo of the structure itself. You see it in van Gogh too, and Courbet—these guys are all in conversation about how to really *see* the world. Anyway, I think painting is about embodied looking, a form of thinking through doing. It's not just about what’s there, but about how we experience it, and how we keep that conversation going.