By the Campfire 1935 - 1944

Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan painted this, By the Campfire, with thick strokes of orange, green, and blue. I can imagine the artist outdoors, maybe en plein air like the Impressionists, but with a wilder energy. Look at that slash of orange, how it disrupts the scene, pulls the eye, and distorts the perspective. I bet he was really going for it, layering the paint, trying to capture the raw energy of the fire, the feeling of the moment. The surface of the painting looks really textured, like he was wrestling with the paint, trying to get it just right. That figure to the right almost disappears into the green, while the mountains behind seem to sway. It reminds me of early German Expressionists like Kirchner, of the ways they were thinking about the figure in the landscape. But here, there’s a looseness, an openness, as if to say that painting itself is the campfire, a place of gathering, storytelling, and transformation.