Children at Ice Cream Stand 1939

William H. Johnson probably made this gouache painting, Children at Ice Cream Stand, relatively quickly. The buildings are rendered in broad, flat planes of pale blue, and the pink sky peeks through like the memory of summer. I imagine Johnson standing before the easel, his brush dancing across the paper, capturing a fleeting moment of community. The figures are simplified, almost archetypal, yet they bristle with life. Look at the way he renders the red and yellow umbrella, and then echoes these colours in the fruit stand to the right of the painting; it’s as if Johnson wanted to draw our attention to the formal relationships within the composition. There’s a shared language among painters across time, where they exchange ideas through form, colour, and composition. I think Johnson is in dialogue with other artists who experimented with flatness and figuration, such as Lois Mailou Jones and Jacob Lawrence. This is what makes painting so exciting; it’s an ongoing conversation, and we are all invited to participate.