Movement: Sea, Ultramarine and Green; Sky, Cerulean and Grey 1947

John Marin painted *Movement: Sea, Ultramarine and Green; Sky, Cerulean and Grey*, in the USA sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Look at those brushstrokes! Short, choppy, each one a little jolt of color. You can really see how Marin is thinking, how he’s feeling, as he’s laying down the paint. It’s pure process. The paint here is so alive. It’s not trying to trick you into thinking it’s something else. It's just paint, dragged and dabbed, a celebration of its own materiality. Notice that intense red circle right in the middle. It's like an anchor, a focal point in all that watery movement. It keeps the whole thing from floating away, I think. Marin was part of that early American Modernist gang, like Dove and O’Keefe. They were all trying to find a way to paint that felt true to their own experience, not just copying what they saw, but building a new way of seeing, thinking, feeling. Like a jazz riff, it’s a conversation, a call and response across time.