Paysage De La Manche c. 1902

Armand Guillaumin made this landscape painting of the Manche coast with oil paint, probably en plein air. Imagine him, squinting, brushes in hand, trying to wrangle the shifting light and wind into something solid on the canvas. You can almost feel the breeze, can’t you? The way the paint is laid on, in these delicious little strokes, it's not just about what he saw, but how he felt being there. Look at the greens and blues, they’re almost edible. I wonder what he was thinking when he put down those strokes of color. I can imagine him thinking, "How do I make this field breathe?" or "How do I make that water shimmer?" He's wrestling with something real, trying to capture that particular feeling of being in that place, on that day. And that's what painters do, isn’t it? We steal from each other, borrow, and build on what's come before. We’re all just trying to figure out how to make the world make sense on a flat surface, one brushstroke at a time.