Paysage Ou Rue Dans Le Midi 1918

Henri Matisse’s painting ‘Paysage Ou Rue Dans Le Midi’ is a landscape of the South of France rendered in a mix of earthy greens and browns, pale pinks and blues. You can almost feel Matisse moving the paint around, trying to capture the light, the air, the specific feeling of being in that place. The paint is relatively thin but the marks are quite visible; the layers of color and texture create a sense of depth and movement. I love how Matisse simplified the forms and shapes of the landscape. There’s a building on the left, bathed in soft light, and trees on the right swaying in the breeze. The lines are loose and gestural, suggesting rather than defining the objects. What was he thinking as he painted this? How could he capture the essence of this landscape without getting bogged down in details? His solution seems to be in the active brushwork. Matisse understood that painting is a conversation between artists and between art and the world. Each gesture is like a sentence, and the painting is the story.