Maison dans la Campagne 1982

"Maison dans la Campagne" was painted by Bernard Buffet using oil on canvas sometime in the mid-20th century. It shows a house in the French countryside. The palette is muted, almost grey, with the house rendered in yellow and trimmed with pink. It's got a kind of graphic, stark feel, don't you think? I wonder what Buffet was thinking when he made this; was he trying to capture the stillness and isolation of rural life? Or maybe he saw something almost sinister in the clean lines of the house against the grey sky. The paint looks pretty thin, almost like washes of color, except for the stark lines around the buildings. Those bold strokes remind me of artists like Edward Hopper, who used to draw similarly on architectural subjects. It's like they are all contributing to some grand conversation about what it means to be a painter, seeing and thinking about the world in a very particular way. We never truly arrive at one fixed interpretation with paintings like this, and I like that."