#4 Creek c. 1923

Arthur Dove made '#4 Creek' with charcoal on paper. I can only imagine Dove hunched over this sheet, smudging and rubbing the charcoal to conjure this evocative landscape. The image emerges from the murkiness of the charcoal, with the darks really dark. It feels almost claustrophobic, but there’s also a sense of depth that sucks you in. I find myself thinking, what was he trying to capture? That deep hollowing form, like a riverbed turned on its side, with those little pebble shapes clustered at the bottom. The vertical strokes in the background, they feel like trees, but also bars, like a gate. There's a struggle for light, and a real sense of searching for form. Dove was a great painter, one of the first abstract artists in America, and he's an inspiration to painters today who are thinking about the relationship between abstraction and nature. It’s like he's saying, nature isn't just something to be seen, but felt, and known, through the body, through the hand, and through the medium.