Man's Straw Hat 1935 - 1942

Stella Mosher made this watercolor painting, "Man's Straw Hat," sometime during her lifetime, which stretched from the mid-19th to the late 20th century. It’s a tableau of possible hats, rendered in delicate washes of brown and sepia. I can imagine Mosher, carefully mixing her pigments, patiently building up these straw textures with tiny, repetitive strokes, trying to capture the light as it plays across the woven surfaces. You can see her curiosity, her attention to detail, in each careful mark. Maybe she sketched out a few ideas, then opted to fully render only one of them. There’s something so charming about the way she's arranged these hats on the page. One is fully formed, with a jaunty black ribbon, while another remains a ghostly outline. I wonder if she thought about the act of depicting as an incomplete project. The final hat has a rough texture and a bulbous quality. The painting becomes a visual conversation about style, form, and the act of representation itself. It reminds me that we’re all just trying to find our own way of seeing, and painting is one path toward that goal.