Brooklyn Bridge 1912

John Marin conjured this Brooklyn Bridge with watercolors on paper, and I can only imagine the dance between his brush and the wet surface. Look at those strokes of blues and purples swirling together – the bridge emerging like a hazy memory. There's a real sense of fluidity here, and I bet he was thinking about how the bridge feels to cross. The bridge is an old subject, but Marin makes it new. I'm totally drawn to the way he lets the colors bleed into each other, like a kind of controlled chaos, right? It’s as if the bridge is dissolving, becoming one with the atmosphere around it. You see these loose washes of color that give the whole thing a dreamlike quality, something kind of in between abstraction and representation. Marin’s approach reminds me of other painters obsessed with light and movement. With this painting, I'd say he's urging us to embrace the ephemeral, the fleeting moments of beauty in the world around us.