Paris at Night. Boulevard des Italiens 1908

Konstantin Korovin dashed off this painting of Paris at Night on the Boulevard des Italiens, we don’t know exactly when, but probably with oil on canvas. He’s making the painting right in front of us, and letting us see the decisions he's making. Look at the way the lights are just dragged across the surface, wet into wet, and how the buildings are just sort of suggested. There’s so much dark paint, and from that dark, thick texture, he’s pulling light out of the darkness. Those flicks of white and yellow suggesting the lamps, and the way the streetlights reflect on the wet road. I see, in the lower right, a stroke of red against the dark green and I wonder about the conversations he might have been having with the Impressionists. For me, it's a painting about how we see, and how seeing is always a process, not a fixed thing. It reminds us that a painting can be many things, like a memory, and always open to interpretation.