Miner's Chair - Hand Made c. 1940

Rose Campbell-Gerke painted this miner’s chair – a hand-made object – with watercolor on paper. I’m thinking about Rose, and her concentration on this wooden chair. It’s got a light, natural palette of browns and tans. You can see the grain of the wood, the way the legs cross each other, all those little details. There's something quietly radical about choosing such an everyday subject. You know, it’s not a grand landscape or a portrait of someone important. It's just this chair. Maybe she saw something special in its simplicity, in the way it was put together. Maybe she was thinking about the person who made it, the miner who might have used it. Each stroke of watercolor seems like a meditation on use and craft. This reminds me of Fairfield Porter, who also found beauty in the mundane. And it makes me wonder, what other overlooked corners are full of potential paintings? How can we, like Rose, train ourselves to really see?