Bellows c. 1940

Oscar Bluhme made this watercolour painting of a bellows, but when I look at this I think about a big wood fired pizza oven, and how the cook stokes the embers into flame with a bellows like this. I can just imagine Bluhme, armed with his watercolour paints, carefully layering the pigment to build up the textures and colours in this painting. Look at how the red material seems to billow in the centre of the bellows, and the careful attention he's given to the grain of the wood. When I look at this it feels like he is trying to capture the very essence of this thing! What could he have been thinking as he was creating it? Perhaps just trying to capture this moment in time or to show his love for this object. Artists have always been in conversation with each other and the world, and this picture is part of that exchange, inspiring creativity and new ways of seeing. Painting is a kind of embodied expression that embraces uncertainty and ambiguity, so we can interpret its meaning in different ways.