Bermuda No. 1, Tree and House 1917

Charles Demuth made this watercolour of a Bermudan landscape sometime in his career. Look at these soft washes of colour! It's like he’s barely touched the paper with his brush. Imagine Demuth out there, maybe squinting in the bright Bermudan light, trying to distill the scene before him: a house, a tree, the vast sky. It’s all simplified into these geometric shapes, a bit Cubist, a bit like memory. The way the colours bleed into each other, it feels so delicate, like he’s capturing a fleeting moment, a whisper of a place. I think about artists like Demuth, wrestling with how to see, how to feel, and then trying to get that down on paper. Each stroke, each wash, is a decision, a question, a reaching out. And in the end, it becomes this thing we can stand in front of and wonder about, maybe even find a little piece of ourselves in it. Painting is like this ongoing conversation, always evolving.