Gale at Etretat 1920

Henri Matisse made this painting of a coastal scene with oil on canvas. The artist may have started with the sky, smudging and blending blues and whites with the flat of his brush. Down below, the waves are evoked with layered strokes of teal, viridian and white. I can almost feel the wind he describes so well. I can imagine that Matisse was wrestling with the scene, trying to find the right balance between what he saw and what he felt. He wasn’t interested in exact representation, but he was thinking about the properties of the painting itself. How he could evoke this place using colour and form and gesture. I wonder if he was thinking of Courbet when he made this? The materiality, the thickness of the brushstrokes. I think about how artists are in this ongoing conversation across time. Looking at each other’s paintings and spurring each other on.