Parisergata 1915

Nils Dardel made Parisergata with watercolor and pencil, just throwing down these loosey-goosey figures and forms on paper. Look at the way he’s scrubbed in the colors – greens, blues, purples – as if he's trying to capture the fleeting feel of a Parisian street. I can just imagine him, perched somewhere with his pad, trying to get it all down. He’s got these almost cartoonish characters milling about, but there’s something so earnest in the way he’s rendered them. It reminds me a bit of Dufy, but with a kind of naive charm that’s all Dardel’s own. The way he suggests the light filtering through the trees and the hubbub of the cafe, it's like he's trying to bottle the essence of a moment. Painters like Dardel remind us that painting is always a conversation, a back-and-forth between what we see, what we feel, and what we make.