At the Spring 1921

Magnus Enckell made this watercolour, "At the Spring" with a flurry of strokes that almost feel like the air is moving around this bending figure. I can almost feel the chill of the water on my face, you know? He's working with greens and browns, purples and blues, with a kind of wet-on-wet technique, allowing those colours to bleed and mingle and fuse together so that the image feels like it’s emerging from the depths of some misty memory. I wonder if Enckell was thinking about the Symbolists who came before him, but with something else in mind, a kind of naturalistic but also queer sensibility. That downward curve of the figure's back! It’s a shape I’ve been exploring in my own paintings recently: that tension between bending over, kneeling, stooping. He has captured the moment of pausing, right before something shifts, or changes, or is discovered. This is how all artists speak to one another through time. It’s a reminder that painting isn’t just about depicting something; it's about feeling something.