Palm Palisades 1947

Graham Sutherland made this painting, Palm Palisades, with oil on canvas. Just imagine him, brush in hand, in front of that searing red ground, figuring out how to make these strange plant forms emerge. I love the drama of the spiky white and grey shapes shooting upwards, like architectural follies or maybe some strange, aggressive cacti. The colors are so intense. You can almost feel the heat radiating from that red. It’s a hot, almost hallucinatory space. I wonder if Sutherland was thinking about Picasso or maybe even Matisse when he made this. Those artists played with flattening space and intensifying color in similar ways. It's like he's taken the language of modernism and applied it to the natural world, finding these weird, almost monstrous forms lurking in the landscape. It makes me think about how artists keep riffing off each other across time. Each painting is like a note in a long, ongoing conversation.