Deborah Barlow blogs about the "effort filled effortlessness of Matisse."  She adds her thoughts to Sebastian Smee's recent profile of Matisse's Petit Interieur a la table de Marbre Ronde at the Worcester Art Museum.

Barlow writes that Matisse's painting "confronts the mystery that is at the core of [his] oeuvre. His signatory effortlessness was anything but effortless. That ease and flow was hard won." She concludes "…art making can be the way we possess the qualities we don't embody easily, to evoke moods, auras and existences that are vastly different from the ones we inhabit."