St. Johns River, New Brunswick, Canada 1951

John Marin made this watercolor sketch of the St. Johns River in New Brunswick, Canada, on paper, sometime in the early part of the 20th century. You can really feel the hand in this piece, right? The artist is working fast, using a very limited palette – blues, greens, pinks, and grays. It feels like he’s trying to capture a fleeting impression. Look how the washes of color bleed into one another, creating soft, blurry edges. It’s like a memory of a place, not a photorealistic depiction. See that patch of blue at the top? It could be the sky, but it also feels like a swatch of pure color, a kind of abstract shape. It's kind of like the whole landscape is dissolving into abstraction. Marin, like his contemporary Marsden Hartley, was deeply inspired by the landscape of Maine and Canada. But while Hartley went for high drama, Marin is all about capturing the immediacy of experience, the here and now. He reminds me a little of Cy Twombly, another artist who found a way to make drawing and painting into a kind of personal handwriting.