Poodle c. 1940

Selma Sandler made this drawing of a Poodle, but the date is unknown and its rendered in tones of gold and brown, and with some form of watercolour perhaps. The dog is bisected into two halves, the rear is smooth and the fore textured, its almost like it's wearing a suit of chainmail. The mark making is fastidious, like a textile design, a web of tiny interlocking squares, repeated over and over. There's a real tension between the flat image and the illusion of depth, especially in the dogs face. It makes me think of Guston, especially his later works, and the way he embraced the absurd, the cartoonish. It's refreshing to see an artist embrace the quirky, the imperfect, and the downright strange. After all, art should be a conversation, not a monologue.