Landscape, New Mexico 1919 - 1920

Marsden Hartley made this painting, Landscape, New Mexico, with oil on board sometime in his lifetime. It’s full of gestural marks in muted earth tones, blues and greens that conjure a landscape from a shifting perspective. I can just imagine Hartley, out there in New Mexico, squinting in the sun, trying to capture the essence of the desert light on these rocks. Did he mix the paint right there on the canvas, building up those layers, those textures? The thickness of the paint, the way he’s dabbed and stroked it, gives the whole scene a kind of raw energy. Look at the way he’s handled the shadows around the rocks – it's like he's wrestling with the light itself. You can see him working out how to translate his own sense of wonder at the landscape and the relationship to the great tradition of landscape painting. I bet he was thinking of Cezanne. We all are.