Dull gray 1930

Wassily Kandinsky made this painting, Dull Gray, with oil on canvas. Kandinsky’s touch here is so light, almost like he’s sketching with paint. Take a look at that big, pale triangle in the bottom left. See how the color shifts so subtly from yellow to pink? It's like he's coaxing the color out of the canvas. And then there's that circle near the top – it’s not a perfect circle, but more like a suggestion of one, with these little dashes and lines kind of orbiting around it. You can feel the movement, the energy, in these marks. It makes me think of Paul Klee, another artist who was trying to find a new language for painting, a way to express the inner world through simple forms and colors. Both of them were searching for something beyond the surface of things. It’s like they’re both asking: what else can painting be?