Clock 1937

Arthur Mathews made this watercolor clock, sometime we don’t know when, on paper. The piece has this lovely sense of precision – the careful rendering of the clock face and the woman in the lower panel – mixed with something a bit looser and weirder. The clock is the star here, right? But it's not just a clock. The woman in the glass, is she part of the clock, or trapped in it? The surface is so flat, almost like a diagram, but then you notice the tiny details. Look at how Mathews uses these delicate washes of color to give depth to the wood grain. The blacks are deep and glossy, but the reds are almost translucent. There is a tension between the clean lines of the clock’s architecture and the slightly awkward rendering of the figure. This reminds me a bit of Florine Stettheimer, who also had this amazing ability to combine elegance and absurdity in her paintings. Both artists remind us that art doesn’t have to be one thing or the other, it can be both at the same time.