House with a red gate 1931

Tadeusz Makowski made this painting of a house with a red gate, we don't know exactly when, but it's oil paint on canvas. The brushwork is pretty direct, kind of chunky in places, like you can see how the forms are built up with these simple, squarish dabs of colour, which tells us a lot about his process. I love how the red gate is not just a flat colour, but a kind of patchwork of reds and browns. It's almost sculptural, that physicality adds a richness. Look at the way the blueish greys in the wall of the house on the right are applied, it feels like he’s really digging into the surface, pushing the paint around to find the form. And that bare tree in front, it's so expressive, like a little scribble of emotion. It reminds me a bit of some of the early Fauvist painters, like Maurice de Vlaminck, who were also using colour and texture in similarly bold ways. Art is such a conversation, isn't it? A back-and-forth across time and space, full of echoes and whispers.