Venice, Santa Maria della Salute and Campanile di San Marco c. 1922

Carl Moll made this painting of Venice with oils, and there’s such a lovely, soft haziness to it. You can see him building up layers, one tone laid delicately over another, to make the scene emerge. I wonder, was Moll standing on a boat, gently rocking as he painted? Or did he return to the same spot on the bank each day? What’s lovely to me is how the buildings on the horizon are mirrored in the water: short, choppy strokes of pale green that become the ripples of the lagoon. Then there are the longer, vertical lines, too, like the surface of the water is a kind of blurred-out screen. Moll was part of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who wanted to break away from the traditional art establishment. You see a similar urge to capture fleeting, sensory experience in the work of the Impressionists. It makes me think about how painters are always in dialogue with one another, reaching back and forth across time. Each brushstroke is a response to what came before, an ongoing conversation that we’re all invited to join.