Crock c. 1936

Here's Samuel Sulkowitz's watercolor of a crock. Look at the evenness of tone. I wonder if he mixed a big bucket of paint and just laid it all down? There’s something so quietly radical about taking an ordinary object and giving it this kind of attention, like a monk patiently illuminating text. It's like he's saying: "Hey, even this humble jar has a story to tell." What was Sulkowitz thinking as he painted this? Did he have one of these at home, a family heirloom? He’s not making anything up, just showing us what's there. Those blue decorations look almost like stylized feathers, but he probably didn’t want them to be *too* feathery. It's this tension between representation and abstraction that gets me going. Painters are always in conversation, like, centuries of back-and-forth about how we see, and how we make. Sulkowitz invites us to join in that conversation, to bring our own stories and see what emerges.