Road along the Loing canal 1902

Camille Pissarro’s “Road along the Loing canal” is a medium sized oil painting made sometime in the late 19th century. Look how Pissarro builds up the image with layers of short brushstrokes, like he's knitting the scene together. You get the feeling that he wasn't trying to copy nature exactly, but to capture the feeling of light, air, and movement. The paint is applied in a way that emphasizes texture, you can almost feel the roughness of the tree bark. Notice how the colors are broken down into tiny touches of greens, browns, and blues, which makes the scene shimmer and vibrate. The way the light reflects on the water is really something, isn't it? I am drawn to the way Pissarro applied the paint in small dashes, it feels very intuitive to me. Each mark feels like a little decision, a response to what he saw and felt in that moment. Pissarro’s work reminds me a bit of Cezanne, another painter who was interested in breaking down forms into their essential shapes. Both artists were part of a larger conversation about how to represent the world in a way that was more true to our experience of it, more subjective, and less about perfect representation.