Weather Vane: Rooster c. 1939

Marian Page painted this Weather Vane: Rooster using watercolor, graphite, and colored pencil on paper. The earthy color palette feels almost monochromatic, bringing a tactile, sculptural quality to a 2D image. This is because the artist is exploring how to translate the qualities of metal using paint. There’s a real sense of materiality in the way Page uses pigment to simulate a metallic surface. Look closely at the rooster's tail. See how the watercolor mimics the texture of tooled or hammered metal? I love the way she captures the sheen, the highlights and shadows, as the light hits it. The paper is left bare in places, adding to the illusion. For me, this piece is less about the rooster, and more about how surface and light are constructed. Page, like Charles Demuth, had an interest in the meeting point of abstraction and representation. Like Demuth, she finds a way to make us look beyond the surface to find a deeper meaning. There's real poetry here.