Speeding Motorboat 1923

Benedetta Cappa captured this speeding motorboat with oil on canvas. I love imagining her in the act of painting, layering those blues and yellows, trying to capture the essence of speed and movement. You know, when I look at this painting, I think about how Cappa might have felt, trying to freeze a moment of pure velocity. It's like she’s asking, "How do you paint something that's always changing, always moving?" The textures, the way the colors blur into each other, it all feels so deliberate, like she's pulling us into her experience. That single stroke of the brush, the way the light catches it, that’s where the magic happens. Cappa probably felt the same excitement, the same challenge. And you can see echoes of her process in the work of other painters who were trying to depict movement, like Boccioni, or maybe even later with someone like Richter.