Venice, Boats 1912

Oscar Bluemner made this small drawing, Venice, Boats, with pen, ink, and watercolor. Look at how the lines and marks pile up, one on top of the other – like a construction site held together by a fragile, wobbly armature. There is nothing precious about this drawing, it’s as though he were thinking out loud, trying to work something through. He is feeling his way around a subject, allowing the image to come into being through trial, error, and intuition. I sympathize with him. Maybe he was sketching on the go, trying to catch the light, the atmosphere, the feeling of Venice. He's using color here just to give enough information, but really it’s about the relationships of forms, the way one thing meets another. You can almost sense him thinking about those other early modernists and their own works on Venice, how to make something new from something so well-worn. Artists are always talking to each other across time, inspiring one another's creativity. And for me, painting is also a form of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple readings.