Dress c. 1937

This drawing of a dress on paper was made by Mae A. Clarke, but we don’t know exactly when. I wonder what it was like to have a sense for fashion so deeply embedded you could render it in a few lines? The dress emerges as a ghostly apparition from the page. You can almost feel the dress moving, can’t you? The crisp lines remind me of Agnes Martin’s use of line to describe the unseen or the unreal. But this is so much more practical. It's a subtle piece, a whisper of an idea. What was Mae thinking when she created this image? Was it a beloved garment, or something imagined, a dress that might exist someday? It makes you think about all the dresses we’ve loved, lusted after, or lost. It makes you think about exchange. Painting and drawing is a kind of embodied expression, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty. Artists are in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity.