Cannes Scenery 1967

Umehara Ryuzaburo made this scene of Cannes with paint on canvas, and it feels like a record of seeing more than a landscape in the conventional sense. The paint handling has a real directness. You can see how each area has been worked with small marks, and although he’s chosen a limited range of blues, greens, reds, and browns they are all subtly different. Look at how these strokes accumulate to create an atmosphere, the surface of the water or the shapes of the trees. It all feels very provisional, and as if he’s finding the image as he goes. There is such pleasure in the materiality of paint. The overall effect reminds me of Bonnard, who also had a way of making paintings feel like both a representation of a place and a meditation on the act of painting itself. Ultimately, this piece reminds us that art is an ongoing conversation, a dance of ideas across time, and that its beauty lies in its ambiguities, inviting multiple interpretations rather than fixed meanings.