Untitled 1940 - 1946

This small, untitled painting by Arthur Dove uses simple colors and shapes to capture something big. It's a painting about feeling, more than seeing. Look at how Dove uses blocks of color, like the cool blue nestled inside the reddish-brown, jagged shapes. The paint isn't trying to trick you into thinking it's something else, like a landscape. Instead, it's just paint, laid down in layers, building up a kind of emotional architecture. The textures are subtle, but they’re there. You can almost feel the grain of the paper underneath, a reminder that this is a handmade thing, a process frozen in time. That dark-brownish circle near the top right? It's not trying to be anything, but it adds a kind of quiet tension, like a held breath. Dove's work reminds me a bit of Marsden Hartley, another artist who wasn’t afraid to let his feelings lead the way, turning simple forms into powerful expressions. It’s like they’re saying, “let’s see what happens if we just feel our way through this.”