By the Sea 1909

Piet Mondrian made this painting, By the Sea, with oil on board. It's full of these gorgeous gestural marks. The painting is built from horizontal layers of color, shifting in tone from the reddish ground to the hazy horizon. I can almost see Mondrian standing there, squinting at the horizon, trying to capture the way the light hits the water. The brushstrokes are so present; you can feel the artist's hand moving across the surface. Look at the very top, that brooding grey-blue cloud formation, the thick paint almost sculptural, like he was trying to grab hold of something fleeting, something impossible to pin down. It's like he's wrestling with the materiality of paint, trying to make it do something it doesn't want to do. Maybe, Mondrian was thinking about the history of landscape painting while making this work. I imagine that, for him, painting was this ongoing conversation across time, where artists bounce ideas off each other, inspiring one another's creativity. And just like that, paintings like this become a space of possibilities, a site of inquiry, where nothing is set in stone.