Woman Picking Flowers 1909

Frantisek Kupka’s "Woman Picking Flowers" is a small pastel on paper. It's awash with sunshine yellow. You can almost feel the warmth radiating from the surface! There’s a figure, or rather, the essence of a figure, rendered in strokes of pink and blue, reaching out, maybe towards the flowers? I can imagine Kupka, with soft pastels in hand, coaxing the image out of the paper, building up layers of color and light. He was so interested in philosophy and how that might be expressed in visual terms. The way Kupka uses color is so evocative, and I'm reminded of other artists, Wassily Kandinsky, for example. This wasn't just about depicting a woman picking flowers; it was about capturing something deeper, an emotion, a moment of pure sensory experience. It makes me think about how, as painters, we're all in conversation with each other, across time, inspiring and pushing each other to see the world in new and unexpected ways.