"One might be tempted to see the background of Joan Miro's Head of a Catalan Peasant IV for what it is (albeit in a certain limited sense): the Miro's physical encounter with the canvas. This scumbled blue ground -which I will call the background even though it often refuses or complicates the organization of a deep space- records in some detail the application of a thin layer of paint. Variations in the density of the paint even across the trajectory stroke appear in Head of a Catalan Peasant with exemplary clarity, so that t position of such brush strokes makes visible the act of painting-that kind of exploration of the surface, in which the variation of direction and pressure play important roles in revealing the support to the beholder. Nowhere is this effect clearer than in the traces of stretcher bars that appear intermittently Miro's paintings from around 1925, to which I'll return presently..."