Petit Point 1935 - 1942

Bessie Vandre’s Petit Point is, well, petite, made with needle and thread on a roughly square piece of woven fabric. The fabric is beige and loose. It looks unfinished, with ghostlike images floating above a little story being told in the bottom half. Here, in the foreground, there’s a monkey, a little girl, a palm tree, a dancing character, and even a decorative flourish. The stitching is crude, but earnest, almost as if the needle was being used like a pencil to roughly fill in the contours of each figure. Look closely at the monkey, the texture feels almost like raw clay, each stitch an individual daub of color. This work really speaks to process – the artist feels to me like someone like Forrest Bess, who makes their art in total isolation from their contemporaries. It is a totally unique approach to the possibilities of artmaking, and all the more interesting for it.