Le village en fête 1975 - 1976

This is Marc Chagall’s, Le village en fête. Looks like it’s made with crayon, or maybe pastel. There's something so immediate in the way the image is rendered, like a memory recalled and quickly scribbled down. The surface is alive with marks; a frenetic energy animates the whole scene. Notice the way the colors aren’t contained within the lines, they bleed into each other creating this dreamy, ethereal quality. Look at the ox floating above the village, its form outlined in blue, filled with a rosy red. There’s a sense of weightlessness, of joy. The crayon is applied with varying pressure, sometimes creating thick, waxy deposits, other times just a whisper of color. It gives the image a wonderful texture, like a tapestry woven with light and shadow. Chagall’s work reminds me of Joan Miró, a fellow traveler in the realm of dreams and the subconscious. Both artists embraced the power of simplicity, of childlike wonder, to create worlds that are both familiar and strange.