End of Timberline, Mt. Hood 1904

Childe Hassam made this watercolor, End of Timberline, Mt. Hood, with a sense of immediacy. You can almost feel him responding to the landscape as he worked. There’s a tentativeness, an exploratory quality to Hassam’s mark-making; the washes of color are thin, like he's trying to capture a fleeting impression, and it gives the scene a feeling of lightness. The trees have been built with multiple layers of color, thin browns and greys, and the paper shows through in many places. The landscape is made up of marks that are quite abstract, it’s only when we put it all together that it coalesces into a picture. I think of Cézanne who was doing something similar a little earlier, building form with color, and making no bones about the fact that a painting is an arrangement of marks on a flat surface. It's a reminder that art is always a conversation. It's never really finished, is it?