With an umbrella 1939

Paul Klee made "With an Umbrella" using gouache, whatever year it was he was busy painting. There is a lot of gray but the colours are simple. A dot, a blob, and a line, and it makes a person. I am into the way the body is described. The red circle, it’s so confident; it is not trying to be perfect. See how the paint’s surface has that gritty texture? It’s almost like he’s scrubbing the colour into the paper, leaving these tiny, rough patches. That really throws the foreground forward and the background, pushes it back. It’s all about feeling, like he’s trying to capture an emotion. Klee had a way of taking really basic shapes and turning them into something with a lot of feeling. Like Miró, he understood that a painting can be like a poem, hinting at things without spelling them out completely.