Holy Water Font 1935 - 1942

Majel G. Claflin made this holy water font out of watercolor on paper, and look how she's built it from the bottom up with these layered rings. I can feel her there, layering tone on tone, building depth with each stroke, deciding just how round to make it, the kind of brown and how shiny. Do you see how the color shifts from light to dark to suggest its roundness? It's like she’s coaxing out the form through her brush. I wonder if she was thinking about the rituals this font would be part of, the weight and coolness of water, the daily-ness of devotion. There’s a meditative quality to the piece, a quiet observation, like a painter talking to herself about the world. She is thinking out loud and the painting is what it sounds like. Painters are in conversation, you know? They influence each other across time, riffing off ideas, experimenting and pushing boundaries. The way we put paint down is always open to possibilities, an invitation to see things not just as they are, but as they could be.