Hellig kvinde i landskab med borg i baggrunden 1929

Agnes Slott-Møller painted this small watercolor of a holy woman in a landscape with a castle in the background sometime in the early twentieth century. The arch-shaped composition is divided into three horizontal bands of color: an expanse of grassy green in the foreground, the cerulean blue of the sea, and the hazy light blue of the sky. I wonder what Slott-Møller was thinking as she made this? She must have been so involved with the application of delicate washes of color, letting them blend and bleed into one another. The slight tilting of the woman’s head gives her figure a sense of movement. Her pose is so subtle, as if she is inviting us to look at the castle. Looking at the painting, it makes me think of the Pre-Raphaelites and their romantic depictions of women. There is a way painters respond to one another’s work across time, and this creates a kind of conversation. It's a reminder that painting, like life, is about process, not product.