Seated Nude 1919

Wyndham Lewis made this watercolor drawing, "Seated Nude," sometime in his career, and you can see he’s figuring out the figure, letting the lines do a lot of the work. It’s like he's mapping out a body, and the process feels really present, like he's thinking aloud with his brush. I’m drawn to the way Lewis uses watercolor here. It's so delicate, almost like a whisper of color. The washes of peach and tan give the figure a soft, almost ephemeral quality, but then those bold lines come in and ground it. Look at the hand resting on the knee – it’s just a few scribbled lines, but it tells you everything you need to know. It's this combination of precision and looseness that makes the piece so compelling to me. You know, looking at this piece, I can’t help but think about Picasso. They were contemporaries, always bouncing ideas off each other, and you can see that shared interest in deconstructing and reassembling the human form. Art's just a big conversation, right?