Landscape 1894 - 1943

Edvard Weie made this small landscape painting with oil on canvas. I love the directness of the paint application here, daubs and blobs of thick colour stacked together. This isn’t a photographic landscape, but the artist is clearly trying to capture something of the experience of being in a landscape. I can imagine him trying to express something beyond mere representation. I feel a sense of the artist grappling with the essence of the landscape, a back and forth, adding, subtracting, editing. There’s a dialogue happening, and I think he’s asking himself, what does it feel like to be here, and how can I make that feeling visible? I’m reminded of other artists such as Van Gogh, or even Bonnard, how they transformed observed reality into their own visual language. It is a reminder that the act of painting is a continuous conversation, each artist building upon the ideas and experiments of those who came before.