Kallmünz—Light-Green Mountains 1903

Wassily Kandinsky made this oil on cardboard, titled Kallmünz—Light-Green Mountains, with small, repetitive brushstrokes of greens, blues, and yellows. I wonder what it was like for Kandinsky to stand there and make this landscape? Did he feel the sun beating down or a cool breeze? I see a light green meadow undulating with subtle shifts in hue; short marks of yellow, almost scrubbed into the surface, give way to dabs of darker, mossy green at the bottom. Then these big, jagged rocks and a steep hillside – it’s all tilting toward abstraction. It makes me think about how the act of painting is a kind of conversation across time. Every mark an artist makes is in dialogue with painters who came before, an exchange of ideas that stretches back centuries. In painting, nothing is ever really fixed, is it? We can always find new ways of seeing, of feeling, of understanding.