Dog Lying in the Snow c. 1911

Here's a dog, lying in the snow, painted by Franz Marc – what a beautiful, tender, intimate painting! The colours are muted – yellows, greens, blues – laid down in simple, clear shapes. It’s like he’s reimagining the world through colour. It’s not just about what things look like but about what they *feel* like. I can imagine Marc in his studio, experimenting with how to represent the essence of this animal. There's a rhythm of looking and painting, of shifting colour and shape, of trying to capture the dog’s quietness and the coldness of the snow, a world made of light and shadow. He's working with a simplified, geometric vocabulary, reducing forms to their most basic elements, like Cezanne. The dog, after all, is segmented like an orange! That band of purple around the neck – it's a jolt of colour that holds the whole composition together. It’s a reminder that artists are in an ongoing conversation, riffing off each other’s ideas, finding new ways to see and feel the world.