Wedding Shoe c. 1937

Edna C. Rex made this watercolor of a high-laced boot. It’s creamy, worn, slightly yellowed – a real object, but also kind of an idea of a shoe. I wonder what it was like for Rex to sit with this object, studying its form, its subtle gradations of color. You can almost feel the artist trying to figure out how to capture the way the light hits the leather, the gentle curves, the worn laces. There’s a tenderness in the way the boot is rendered, a sense of care. Was this her own wedding shoe or a borrowed memory? This painting makes me think about other artists who find beauty in the everyday, like Morandi with his bottles. Artists are always in conversation, aren’t they? It’s about seeing the world anew, finding poetry in the ordinary. And maybe that’s what Rex was doing here – not just painting a shoe, but capturing a moment, a feeling, a memory. Painting is like that, a way of making sense of the world, one brushstroke at a time.