Paradise Point 1919

George Bellows made this painting, Paradise Point, with oil on canvas. The marks are immediate, gestural. The paint is applied in these strokes, like slabs of colour, blues and greens and the pink of the rocks. I imagine Bellows standing there, trying to work out how to make it happen, thinking of the Old Masters but wanting to do something modern. I’ve been there! That desire to make a solid painting, where the very stuff of the paint is part of what it is and what it means. There’s a figure in a blue dress, very small. Maybe that tiny figure sets the scale, a measure of the bigness of nature. To me, there's the sense that Bellows felt the energy of the place, and he had to use every trick he knew to get it down. It puts me in mind of other painters, like Gustave Courbet. Artists are always looking at each other, wrestling with the same problems, pushing paint around and trying to make something that feels true.