Soft roughness 1933

Here's Wassily Kandinsky’s ‘Soft Roughness’, a painting currently residing at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. The whole composition seems to have come into being slowly, through a process of trial, error, and intuition. I can imagine Kandinsky building up this brown background, like the foundation for something unknown. Then, step by step, he must have felt out the forms, the weight of the pink, the pale cream, as though it was a strange machine. And I wonder, what was he thinking when he added that little dark-red circle with a needle point, like a full stop? Think about how the surface of the painting is – it's not smooth or blended. You can sense his touch, the drag of the brush. It makes me wonder what he was thinking when he made the work. I find it comforting to think of him as a human being, exploring the world through paint, searching for something he didn't quite know how to name. I look at this painting and I think, yeah, we're all just feeling our way through the dark, one brushstroke at a time.