Still Life 1908

Francis Picabia built this small oil painting, *Still Life*, from lots of little marks, like many dabs of summery sunlight. You can almost feel him moving the paint around, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. I feel like Picabia put paint down, stepped back, and maybe thought, "That's not quite right," then went back in, and he kept doing that until he got something he liked. The blues and yellows here are so luminous, they look as if they have been lit from within! I'm really drawn to this kind of painting as a painter. It makes me wonder about the wider world of still life, and all of those artists in art history looking at fruit, trying to work out how to get that down in paint. It makes you part of a long, ongoing conversation. Every painting adds something new, an embodied expression that embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations.