Gray Dress with Violet Stripes 1942

Henri Matisse made "Gray Dress with Violet Stripes" with oil on canvas. Just imagine him, cigarette in mouth, squinting, stepping back, leaning in, trying to get the pose just so. You can tell he's trying to describe the feeling of the dress rather than represent it perfectly. Look at the vertical stripes, a real sea of warm red, so typical of him. It must have been a joy to lay down those marks. He probably worked wet on wet, pushing the paint around so the forms emerge from the coloured ground. His thinking is right there on the canvas. You can see his hand. The more I look at Matisse's paintings, the more I see him having a dialogue with his predecessors and contemporaries, like Cezanne. They are all trying to figure out the same thing: how do you represent the feeling of being alive and seeing, and how do you reduce this to blocks and marks of colour? When you make a painting, you join a conversation that began long before you were born and continues long after you are gone. Isn’t painting just the best? It can be ambiguous, tentative, and provisional.