The Ramapo Mountains Country, N.Y. 1950

John Marin made this watercolor of The Ramapo Mountains in 1950, and it feels like he’s trying to capture the mountains’ essence more than their exact appearance. There’s a lovely lightness to this painting, a kind of searching through washes of translucent blues, browns, and grays. Marin’s working with a restrained palette, letting the white of the paper shine through, giving the whole scene an airy, unfinished quality. I imagine him out there, maybe a little windswept, quickly trying to capture the fleeting light and forms. The lines are scratchy and energetic, like he's trying to nail down the bones of the landscape. Look at the way the blue pools at the bottom—is it water? Is it land? It's ambiguous and evokes a feeling of being in nature more than depicting it. He's not trying to give us a photo-realistic view; he's after something more felt, more intuitive. It’s like a visual poem, a sensory experience distilled into a few marks on paper.