Still Life with Fruit 1917

Cuno Amiet created "Still Life with Fruit" with what looks like quick brushstrokes and a watery, dreamy blue. I can imagine Amiet standing before his subject, maybe with a big brush and thinned paint, letting the image emerge from the white ground. There’s a real sense of immediacy here, a feeling that Amiet was trying to capture the fleeting essence of the fruit rather than its solid form. The juicy colors, the yellow and the red, are trapped in a sea of blue. It’s like he’s playing with how much information to give us, teasing us with a recognizable image that’s also on the verge of dissolving into abstraction. That one confident stroke cutting across the bottom? It’s like a signature move, a bold declaration of the artist’s presence. It reminds me of how we all, as painters, riff on each other’s ideas, pulling them apart and making something new. Painting, after all, is a conversation across time, a way of seeing and feeling that keeps evolving.