Side Canal in Venice 1902

John Singer Sargent made this watercolour painting, Side Canal in Venice, sometime between 1856 and 1925. The way he uses washes of colour gives the impression of light reflecting and shimmering all around. You can see the watery reflections in the canal, the light bouncing off the buildings. The paint isn't overworked, it's allowed to blend and bleed, giving it that loose, breezy feel. Look at the vertical strokes of blues and browns suggesting the buildings. These aren't precise renderings, but rather impressions of architecture, light, and atmosphere. The colours are muted, earthy tones, punctuated by those stark blue vertical lines which add a touch of drama and structure. This particular mark making reminds me of some of the gestural abstraction happening at the time. But where those painters were working towards pure abstraction, Sargent is using that freedom of gesture to capture the very real sensation of being there, in Venice, on the water.