Horses in a Landscape 1924

Max Pechstein made this watercolour image of horses and landscape with fluid marks of diluted paint in blacks and browns. I can imagine Pechstein rapidly capturing the scene before him. See how the horses are rendered with such swift strokes, their forms emerging almost as apparitions from the paper's surface. I bet Pechstein was thinking of other expressionist painters at the time like Kirchner, using colour and gestural marks to convey a kind of raw emotion. The landscape itself is reduced to these horizontal dashes, a shorthand for ground and horizon. The brown paper is like another character, providing a warm ground for the cool tones of the ink. I love how Pechstein leaves parts of it bare, letting it breathe. It reminds me that as painters, we're all in this ongoing conversation, playing off each other's ideas and techniques, trying to find our own voice in the chorus. Pechstein's horses seem caught between presence and absence, inviting us to project our own feelings onto the scene.