King's Chapel, Boston 1923

George Luks made King’s Chapel, Boston with oil paint on canvas, and you can see the surface is built up with brisk strokes of blues, browns, grays, and whites. I can imagine Luks standing on the street, watching and trying to capture the fleeting light on the buildings, the sky, the street below. You can feel the energy of the moment in the brushstrokes, here! See how the paint is applied so thickly in some areas, and thinly in others, creating a sense of depth and texture, so the dark columns shimmer as they recede back into space. Luks uses that loaded brush to push the paint around, constructing a world of buildings and figures, and you feel the buzz of the city. Painters are in an ongoing conversation with one another, and I wonder if Luks was thinking about other painters when he made this! You know, the way we look at the world changes as the world changes. Painters try to capture that feeling, that sense of continual movement.