Motif from Paris 1907

Olga Boznanska made this painting, "Motif from Paris," with oil paint, and I can only imagine the number of layers she put down! There are these marks, and these big swathes of warm color – mostly browns and creams – that give way to the sense of a building, or a boat, something architectural. You can almost feel the artist layering and scraping back the paint, searching for the image amidst the medium itself. I wonder if she found it. It's hard to say, maybe that wasn't even the point. I get a sense of her, Boznanska, out in the city sketching. Maybe she built up this memory of a place over time, through many visits. It reminds me of late Monet, or even Guston, in the way it’s not quite abstract, not quite representational. It makes me think about the conversations that artists are always having with one another, across time, like echoes in a room.