Memories of Travel 1911

Gino Severini made this painting called Memories of Travel, and it’s like he’s collaged all these little colorful dots together to build a world of trains, buildings, and people. The surface of the painting is a buzz, like a million tiny particles vibrating together. The colors are so saturated that they feel like they could almost jump off the canvas. When I look at the buildings on the horizon, they are not tidy – they are wonky, like a child has drawn them. The whole thing reminds me of being a kid, seeing a city for the first time – the shock of color and the feeling of everything moving all at once. It’s like Severini is trying to capture the sensory overload of travel itself, not just the places you go. You can see a similar approach in the work of Sonia Delaunay, who used abstraction to describe movement and rhythm. It’s all about how we see, not just what we see, right?