Untitled 1942

Arthur Dove made this untitled watercolor on paper, and what strikes me is how he's distilling a landscape down to its bare essentials, almost like a musical score. The colours are muted, earthy - browns, greens, blues - but they create this vibrant sense of place. Look at how he layers the washes of color, creating these transparent shapes that overlap and bleed into each other. The paint is thin, almost translucent, which gives the whole piece a light, airy feel. But then, there are these strong, dark outlines that anchor the composition and give it a sense of structure. See the jagged, almost tooth-like marks along the horizon line? They could be trees, or mountains, or maybe just the artist's way of capturing the energy of the landscape. Dove's contemporary, Georgia O’Keefe, also sought to express a uniquely American experience of place, but Dove seems more interested in interiority. It’s like he’s saying, "This is how I feel when I'm in nature," rather than, "This is what nature looks like."