Flight into Egypt 1915

Maurice Prendergast made this small watercolour, Flight into Egypt, sometime between the late 19th and early 20th century. It feels immediate, like he’s painted it in one go. Look at that donkey. You can see how he applied thin layers of paint, one after the other, allowing the colours to bleed and blend together. The donkey is purple and the foreground a kind of orangey-brown, not exactly representational but who cares? It works. And the background? It's like a tapestry, flowers all over! I imagine Prendergast really going for it. A pure, unadulterated expression. I can almost feel him, brush in hand, capturing the scene with a few, economical strokes, not unlike other modern painters such as Bonnard, Vuillard, or even the later work of someone like Milton Avery. There's a shared love of colour, pattern and an almost naive sense of composition. Artists borrow from each other all the time, it’s the nature of art. There is an ongoing dialogue, where ideas bounce back and forth, inspiring new ways of seeing and creating. Painting invites us to embrace ambiguity, allowing for endless interpretations.