Wading 1916

Edward Henry Potthast made ‘Wading’ with oil on canvas, and you can feel the energy of the sun in the brushstrokes, right? I love to think about the labor of painting itself, the artist moving the paint around with a brush, maybe even smearing it with their fingers. This piece feels like a direct response to the landscape, the trees, and the water. The paint is applied with small, choppy strokes, creating a textured surface that shimmers with light. Look at the way Potthast uses green, how the color vibrates on the canvas. It reminds me of Impressionist painters like Monet or Pissarro, but there’s something uniquely American about the scene, a kind of pastoral simplicity. I wonder what Potthast was thinking about when he was making it. Did he know that he was contributing to a much larger conversation about how we perceive and represent the world around us? Artists are always talking to each other across time!