Untitled 1957

Ernst Wilhelm Nay made this Untitled watercolour on paper with a light touch, in what looks to me like a dance of pure colour. There's a real sense of process. He's letting the water do its thing, allowing those pigments to bloom and spread in their own way. Nay is working with these flat planes of colour, but they're never quite contained. The edges bleed, creating this soft halo effect. It's like he's inviting the colours to mingle, to have a conversation right there on the page. And look at the brushwork! You can almost feel the way he flicked his wrist to create those delicate tendrils of blue. The textures have that lovely granular quality that watercolour can give you if you don't fuss with it too much. This piece reminds me a bit of Kandinsky's earlier experiments with abstraction. Both artists share that sense of wanting to liberate colour from representation, to let it sing on its own. Ultimately, Nay's work is a reminder that art isn't about answers, but about the questions we ask along the way.