Powder Horn c. 1937

Marius Hansen made this watercolor of a powder horn sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It's all about the object, floating there on a plain ground, kind of humble and plain. The brown of the horn itself is built up with thin washes, almost like stains. You can see the paper showing through in places, and that makes it feel light, not heavy, which is quite something given what powder horns were used for. It is kind of like a metaphor for how artists build images, layering up marks, erasures, and revisions to produce an image. The goldy brass fittings at the top, they've got a bit more body, a bit more heft. Hansen is playing with different kinds of paint application here, pushing and pulling, to give us a real sense of the thing. It reminds me of Giorgio Morandi, who also painted bottles with such careful detail that they become something else, something more like portraits. It really shows that everything has the potential to be art, you just have to look at it in the right way.