Park of idols 1938

Paul Klee made this painting on canvas with oil, using a palette of blue, brown, yellow, orange, and gray, all divided by this black matrix. I bet Klee wasn’t thinking about idols at all when he was making this. I imagine he was thinking about forms and colors and how they could come together to create something new. He had the courage to put down a shape, and then another next to it, and see how they played off each other. It's like this brown figure here, that could be a person, or it could be a landscape, who knows? Then there’s that red circle, like a sun or a target, and all these other shapes that seem to float around it. I wonder if Klee knew where he was going with it when he started, or if it just kind of emerged as he went along. Like you start out walking in the woods and end up somewhere totally different than you expected. That’s what I love about painting, this constant conversation across time, where artists inspire each other's creativity. You never know where it might lead!