Hommage au passé 1944

This painting by Marc Chagall, Hommage au passé, is awash with moody blues, punctuated by the warmer tones of the painter figure’s red shirt. You can almost feel the act of painting here; it's a shifting dreamscape emerging through color, the surface worked and reworked with trial, error, and intuition. I think about Chagall standing before the canvas, lost in memory, layering images from his past – a man grieving by a tombstone, a sleeping village, a painter at his easel. It's like he's channeling his thoughts directly onto the canvas, each brushstroke a whisper of feeling. The paint is thinned, washy, transparent and built up in layers. The texture gives it this incredible luminosity. The way he renders figures is really unique; their blue skin seems to glow against the deeper blues around them. Chagall’s dreamlike imagery has inspired so many painters over the years. As artists, we’re always in conversation with one another across time, picking up on each other’s ideas, remixing them, and making them our own. Painting embraces uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations. It’s never just one thing.