Ninth Bucolic: Mantua 1955

Jacques Villon created this landscape, Ninth Bucolic: Mantua, with light washes of color and dark crayon marks. It looks like he started with soft sky tones and then added the watery strokes of green and grey to the scene, shifting and emerging through trial and error. I can imagine Villon standing there with his paper, squinting at the scene, and then, with a flurry of intuitive gestures, trying to capture the fleeting light. The dark horizontal marks across the water communicate the feeling of a breeze. The way Villon lets the paper breathe and the economy of mark making puts me in mind of some of the early modernists like Whistler or even Morandi. Artists are always in conversation, aren’t they? Painting isn't about fixing a definitive meaning, but allowing for multiple interpretations. It's a reminder that art embraces ambiguity, inviting us to see and feel in new ways.