The Madras 1906 - 1907

Henri Matisse made "The Madras" with oil paint, laying down these loose, joyful strokes of colour. I can imagine him, brush in hand, feeling his way through the canvas, adjusting here, correcting there, trusting his intuition. The painting pulses with life. Look at the broad strokes of blues and greens that bring the composition together. The model’s Madras headdress is built up of dabs of red and white. The yellow ochre daubs in her earring draw the eye across the canvas. I think of Matisse as being in dialogue with other painters, like Cézanne, constantly pushing the boundaries of form and colour. It’s like he’s saying, “How far can I go with simplification, with flattening, and still capture the essence of what I see?” Artists are always in conversation like that, building on each other’s discoveries and challenging conventions. Painting offers a way of seeing and experiencing the world, a kind of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity.