Castorland, New York 1913

John Marin made this watercolor painting, Castorland, New York, with soft washes of blue, green, and brown. You can see the layering of color, the way it drips and blends on the paper. I imagine Marin standing outside, feeling the wind, trying to catch the light as it shifts across the landscape. There is an element of chance in watercolor, and I bet he relished that. Look at how the green swells into a lush, rounded form; a tree, maybe? Or is it a hill? The horizon line is loosely defined, and the sky is full of movement, like a thought half-formed. He’s playing with representation and abstraction at once. Marin was part of a community of artists exploring new ways of seeing, including the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley. Artists are always borrowing, stealing, riffing off each other’s ideas. What feels new emerges from a shared understanding of what came before. For Marin, like many of us, painting was a way of asking questions rather than providing answers.