‘Where is My Twist?’ 1902

Beatrix Potter made this watercolour, ‘Where is My Twist?’, and the pale palette is so gentle! It’s all soft browns and pinks and greens – the colours of spring. You can almost see her dabbing at the paper, coaxing the scene into being, a stroke at a time. I imagine Potter in her studio, surrounded by her beloved countryside. She's thinking about the story, how to make it real. She’s watching the light in her room, thinking about painting the light in the room. Look at the way she makes the cat’s fur look so fluffy, you can almost feel it, right? Or the floral designs on the teapot; she's not just copying what's there, she's making her own version. So she makes it up. There's a conversation happening between artists, across time and space. Potter makes me think about the way Helen Frankenthaler stained her canvases, letting the paint soak in, but I also think about the way Maira Kalman draws and writes about everyday life. It’s all connected, you know? We’re all just trying to make sense of the world, one brushstroke, one sentence, at a time.