Cemetery and rectory in Kochel 1909

Wassily Kandinsky made this painting of a cemetery and rectory in Kochel using bold strokes and colours. You can see the painting emerge through his intuitive gestures. I can imagine Kandinsky standing before this scene, brush in hand, trying to capture not just what he sees, but how he feels. The buildings are rendered in bright yellows and oranges, the roofs topped with white, maybe snow. Look how he uses thick daubs of blue to suggest the path or river flowing through the scene. It’s like he's wrestling with the paint, pushing it around the canvas to find the right balance. I wonder if he was thinking about the spiritual in art, which he wrote about so eloquently. His approach reminds me of the Fauvist painters, but more than that, you can already see the development of his own unique visual language. Ultimately it’s not about capturing a scene perfectly, but about expressing something deeper, something felt. Painting is a conversation between artists across time, each one inspiring the next to see the world in new and exciting ways.