Paul Klee

"Summer in Bern. Watercolour wet-on-wet on water-sprinkled paper. Swift, nervous brushwork with a starred tone, parts of which splash across the whole."

This is how Paul Klee describes working with watercolours around 1910 using the wet-on-wet technique: he wets the paper before applying the motif using pigments suspended in water. It is now that he finally begins to use colours, having been unsure of how to work with them and even avoiding them completely for many years. Here, he uses the watercolours lightly and keeps them transparent – a common approach with this technique. The subject is natural: a view from around Sugiez on Lake Murten (also known as Lake Morat) with a steamship. Typically for Klee, the possibilities offered by the technique are exploited: he seems to let the colour wander across the wet paper as it wants, the blue of the lake flooding into the depths beneath the ship, for example. At the bottom of the painting, the blue of the water washes into the green of the lakeside. The transparent, flowing colours give the image an impressionistic character: Klee captures a mood, he makes no attempt to depict the landscape of Sugiez accurately. In his diary for 1910, he writes about his trips to the area:

"In the summer vacations from Bern to the region between Lakes Murten and Neuenburg for their more westerly colouring. Painted several watercolours there."

Klee seems to choose to paint in this area because of what he calls its "westerly colouring".

He is still keeping to natural colours, but the wet-on-wet technique helps him reduce the concrete object and concentrate on the essential elements of what he observes. Klee continues to develop the technique over the years, eventually arriving at his abstract flecks of vividly bright colours.