In the country gem 1929

Paul Klee made this strange little gouache picture, In the country gem, with watercolor and ink using a transfer technique. It’s like he was coaxing it into being. I wonder if he was trying to suggest landscape, or the feeling of landscape. Maybe he was thinking about his Bauhaus colleague, Wassily Kandinsky, and how they both wrestled with abstraction but in such different ways. Look how Klee evokes something figurative and earthy with these funny organic shapes—a sort of lumpy gem. And then there's the jewel-like colours: the red, the blues, blacks and greens, all contained within a dark border like the leading in stained glass. The dark palette, that inky quality! What does the title suggest? What feeling does this artwork evoke? For me it's about process, about moving between modes of representation, never quite settling, but always reaching. It's a conversation across time.