Nolde saw “the execution of my received gift, in the service of which I worked” in the small format works, as he wrote in the manuscript for the “Unpainted Paintings”.
“Many watercolours at that time and later did not achieve the level I was attempting to obtain. I destroyed them mercilessly or cut them up, in an attempt, sometimes with the help of ink and coating paints, to paint my small, freely invented, mostly figurative designs. I did not feel myself bound to any model in nature and painted, sometimes with a slightly cocky smile, or sometimes working like in a dream. A stroke with the brush or finger gave the perceived motion or character to a figure, and I worked with all possibilities, here as in all of my art: the deliberate, the random, the comprehensible and the felt; these are my means.” Again and again there were (contrast) pairs of man and woman, age and youth or brother and sister, on the basis of which he masterfully expressed the ambivalent nature of the human being in countless facets, while they are at the same time all colour.
