Young Girl with Peonies 1909

Alexej von Jawlensky made this painting of a young girl with peonies sometime in the early 20th century, probably in oil on canvas. The red and pink petals of the flowers and the girl’s hat explode against a dark teal ground. You can see the artist building up the surfaces with many touches of paint, adjusting and shifting the image through trial and error. I imagine Jawlensky, brush in hand, trying to pin down that feeling of ephemeral beauty. He coaxes the paint across the canvas, building up a sense of weight and volume through color. The greens and reds don't match up with 'real life', but they make something new. The strokes around her hands are especially interesting to me, like he's trying to figure out how she holds the flowers, or the moment of stillness and quiet contemplation. It feels related to the Fauvist painters of the time, like Matisse, who were also exploring the expressive power of color. Painting is like that, a conversation across time, where artists borrow and steal and transform each other's ideas, again and again. It’s not about fixed meanings but a kind of ongoing creative exchange, an embodied expression.