Chalkware Dog c. 1940

This "Chalkware Dog" by Sadie Berman shows a lot of intuition and experimentation. There is something very appealing about it. I wonder what Sadie was thinking. Maybe she was interested in the kind of readymade folk art that was easily available in America at the time. I can imagine her playing around with it, trying to decide what to depict and how. Sadie has used a limited palette of colors - mostly muted tones, with soft greens and blues, greys and browns. It gives the piece a dreamlike quality. The marks here seem tentative, gentle, and exploratory. They build up the dog’s curly fur in a way that is really suggestive of the way poodles look and feel, and it kind of gives it this 3D effect on paper! It's like Berman and other artists are having this extended conversation across generations, constantly reinterpreting and reinventing the possibilities of the medium. Each stroke is a gesture, a mark of her presence, a testament to the ongoing dance between artist, material, and image.