Garden in St. Germain, The European Quarter Near Tunis 1914

Paul Klee made this watercolor, Garden in St. Germain, near Tunis, sometime around 1914. It's like he's building a garden with little blocks of color, kind of like a kid playing with watercolor paints for the first time. The colors are soft and washy. You see how the watercolor bleeds and blends? It's not about hiding the process but letting it be part of the image, almost like the garden itself is still growing and changing. There’s one area in the foreground, a row of thin, pale blue lines. They could be a fence, but they're also just marks on the paper, a rhythm. It's as if Klee is winking at us, reminding us that it's all just paint and paper. Klee reminds me of Joan Miró who also had this playful approach to form and color, building worlds out of simple shapes and lines. It's all about that push and pull between abstraction and representation. It's not about what you see, but how you see.