Azalee 1910

Christian Rohlfs made "Azalee" with what looks like oil paint, and he wasn’t shy about it. Look at how the painting is built with these confident strokes of red, green, and blue. There’s a lot of energy in this picture, and a real physical sense of how it was made; he’s not hiding anything. What I love is how Rohlfs uses these individual marks to build up something more, a whole bouquet, like how a memory is built up from little fragments. See how the strokes that make up the flowers are almost like dashes of pure feeling? And the way the colors bleed a little at the edges, like the painting is breathing? It reminds me of some of Emil Nolde's flower paintings, in the way that the simple subject matter becomes a vehicle for exploring colour, texture, and the sheer joy of applying paint to a surface. Both artists show us that painting isn’t just about representation; it’s about feeling and about process.