Someone on my twitter feed posted a marvelous painting by Pierre Bonnard. Perusing a link further, I found this wonderful “Fish on a Dish,” above (Poisson dans un plat). The title is catchy in English.
As soon as I saw it, it makes me want to paint. I have a fish that I like to draw, one that I found years ago at random around the time that we first got an internet connection. It was an image I found while looking for a fish cam, and from a pixelated photo I discovered, I have drawn many forms of that fish, one of which appears below (a detail of an acrylic painting). Many of them depart dramatically from their random photographic source.
Now I am wanting to do something in pastel — something — I’m not sure what. A picture with blues, something with squares — maybe the fish, maybe some koi. I don’t know.
But seeing Bonnard’s picture makes me want to paint. I don’t know how it affects you. But for me, it’s as though he put both the sky and the sea on his kitchen table and then this fish in a dish.
