Notre Dame c. 1907

John Marin created this watercolor painting of Notre Dame, and what I love about it is how it feels unfinished, like the memory of a place rather than a photograph. See how the towers of the cathedral rise up out of these pools of diluted color? You can almost feel him dabbing the wet brush onto the page, adding a dash of blue here, a stroke of gray there, capturing the essence of this iconic structure in a few deft gestures. Was he trying to capture the feel of seeing it for the first time? Or how it fades as you walk away? It reminds me a bit of some of Turner’s late watercolors, where form dissolves into light and atmosphere. Painters are constantly responding to one another across time, carrying on this never-ending conversation about how to see, how to feel, and how to translate those experiences onto a two-dimensional surface. And just like that, painting becomes a place of infinite possibilities.