Magnolias 1912

John Singer Sargent made this watercolour painting, Magnolias, with broad washes of green and dark greys and blacks. The painting feels so immediate, almost as if it bloomed into being. The white and pale pink magnolias have been flicked into life, their forms implied rather than described. I love the quickness of Sargent’s hand, his confidence to leave space and allow the paper to breathe. There's a constant push-pull between the representational and the abstract that I really admire. I imagine him thinking about light and shadow, about how to capture the essence of these flowers without getting bogged down in details. This work reminds me of other watercolourists, like Emil Nolde, who similarly used the medium to capture the fleeting beauty of nature. Artists are always in dialogue with each other, across time and space. We see each other and borrow ideas, we work through uncertainty and ambiguity, and we find new ways to express ourselves.