Starboard Light 1935 - 1942

Eugene Bartz made Starboard Light using watercolour, and look how he teases us with transparency! I wonder about the process of painting something like this. You start with this almost technical object, but there’s already something so beautiful and strange about it, especially when you are looking at its reflections. It's a sea green—no, it's more of a murky grey-green, a colour that feels both industrial and organic, like something found at the bottom of the sea. That blue of the glass is pretty intense. It almost hurts your eyes. What I think Bartz is saying is how light, and colour, can turn something ordinary into something really transcendent. I think this quiet watercolour resonates with the work of other artists who were interested in industrial design, or even the early folk artists who were documenting tools and objects of the time. In a way, artists are always in conversation, looking, borrowing, and reinterpreting the world around them through their own unique lenses.