Portrait of Coco and Flowers 1905

Renoir made this portrait of Coco with oil paint, and flowers too, sometime in his career. It’s the kind of painting where you see the making, the colours blend together right in front of you. It’s a process, a tender negotiation between the artist and his materials. Look at how the red of Coco's dress is almost the same shade as the surrounding flowers – Renoir uses the materiality of paint, it’s thickness and thinness, to guide our eye and tug at our emotions. The paint isn't trying to trick you into thinking its anything other than paint. In the top left, there’s this one deep red flower, almost black in the center. It’s a bold, dark mark that anchors the whole composition, kind of like a full stop, a punctuation mark in a sentence. I can imagine Bonnard looking at this and thinking, "Yeah, that's how you do it". It reminds us that art is always in conversation, an exchange of ideas across generations. It’s not about having the answers, but about keeping the conversation alive, embracing the questions, and finding beauty in the ambiguity.