Les Coucous, Tapis Bleu Et Rose 1911

Henri Matisse painted Les Coucous, Tapis Bleu et Rose, with oil on canvas, and what strikes me first is how he's thinking through colour and pattern in the process of making this painting. The surface is matte, chalky almost, with layers built up to create these simple, playful shapes and blocks of colour. There’s a beautiful tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the illusion of depth he manages to create. Look at the way the pink from the tablecloth creeps into the vase, and the way he uses the same shade in the tiny painting in the background - a landscape maybe. It is touches like this that pull everything together. Matisse loved to play with pattern and interior space. You can see this in his later cut-outs too. The German artist, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, also worked with flattened planes of colour like this, but there's something in the light of Matisse that's all his own. Ultimately, it’s about how we keep the conversation of painting alive.