Heavy Seas at Sunset

For Emil Nolde the sea was a primal force—beautiful, awe-inspiring, bountiful, frightening, unpredictable, untamable. He portrayed it in varying moods, from placid to stormy. In Heavy Seas at Sunset, dilute paint, dripping and pooling, outpaced the artist’s brush, so that nature itself collaborated in the making of this work. The paint stains the translucent Asian paper as much as it coats it, resulting in a range of tints from diaphanous to richly opaque. Nolde’s awareness of texture is evident in the froth on the nearest wave, where sinuous paper fibers describe the spray.