Spur c. 1940

R.J. De Freitas made this painting of a spur sometime in the twentieth century, using watercolor. Look at how the metallic sheen is rendered using just the subtle shifts in tone and value, like a grayscale photograph almost. You can really see the artist was thinking through the process of representation. The paint is so thin and transparent here, which makes it all the more remarkable, the way he coaxes out all this depth and form. See how a dab of pale green paint hints at the light reflecting off the star? That area is key to the whole composition. This minimal approach really lets the texture of the paper come through, giving the whole image a kind of soft, aged quality. This piece reminds me of the work of Charles Demuth, who also used watercolor in a really precise way to depict industrial objects. But where Demuth is all about clean lines and modernism, De Freitas has a kind of folk-art feel that embraces the beauty of imperfection. It's a testament to the fact that art isn't about getting things "right," but about seeing and feeling.