Miniature Revolutionary Flag c. 1940

This is a Miniature Revolutionary Flag made by John Hall at an unknown date with what looks like colored pencil on paper. The hatching of the pencil and the way it follows the weave of the flag material almost fools you into thinking it is fabric, rather than an image of fabric. I can really feel the hand of the artist in the small imperfections and tiny marks that make up the whole. In the top left corner, for example, the blue section is rendered in such a way that it looks like each tiny square of the weave is individually colored. The texture of the paper almost emerges through the pigment. For me, this speaks to the endless conversations artists have with each other. The way Hall painstakingly captures the textile reminds me of later photorealist painters like Vija Celmins, who use graphite to achieve a similar effect. Like Celmins, Hall isn’t trying to trick us, but rather draw our attention to the way images and objects are made through touch.