Apple and Pear c. 1909

Renoir painted this humble still life with oils on canvas, and it feels like he built the composition through feeling alone. There's a delicious pear, painted with strokes of yellow and green, sat beside a blush-red apple. I like to think that Renoir was not so interested in the final picture, but more interested in the process of its making. He probably picked up his brushes, mixed his paints, and then the whole painting came into being through improvisation and his own kind of painterly intuition. It's like he was thinking, "how can I get this pear to sit just so?" You can see he's built up the surface with thin layers of paint, scumbling the brush to create an atmospheric haze between the objects and the viewer. It’s as though he's inviting us to participate in his own process of seeing, feeling, and recording the simple stuff in life. We see the world through his eyes, and we start to understand how artists borrow ideas from one another, sparking something new. Isn't that cool?