Green Door, Santa Maria della Salute c. 1904

John Singer Sargent made this watercolour of a green door in Venice, and it feels like he was standing right there, squinting a little bit in the sun. You can almost feel the wateriness, the way the pigment spreads like a stain on paper. I imagine him dabbing at the surface, letting the architecture emerge from the wash, building up and dissolving forms. The dark green of the door feels like a secret, a portal to another world, so the artist, in turn, has made the building almost disappear, like a ghost. The way the washes pool at the bottom of the painting—I love how they’re suggestive of the canal, reflecting the light back up onto the building. Sargent was part of an ongoing dialogue about the nature of seeing, with artists like Monet and Whistler. For all of them, it's about capturing the ephemeral, fleeting impressions of the world. It reminds me that painting is never really finished, but always in process, always changing.