San Luis Obispo Mission Altar Tabernacle from the portfolio "Decorative Art of Spanish California" 1935 - 1942

This altar tabernacle design from San Luis Obispo Mission quietly vibrates off the paper, even though we don’t know who made it. I can imagine the anonymous artist, maybe working in the cool shade of the Mission, carefully mixing the muted palette of tans, reds, and blues. It's interesting how the artist used a limited range of colours to create a harmonious composition that feels both decorative and deeply symbolic. I'm drawn to the simplified, almost geometric forms of the flowers and leaves, how they repeat and mirror each other, creating a sense of balance and order. There's a humility here, a sense of honoring tradition while also finding a personal voice within it. You can see that the shapes are basic, almost like stamps or stencils, so maybe they weren’t aiming for realism. I wonder, what other art of the period were they looking at, what other artists did they learn from? How has art history shaped their vision? Artists are always in dialogue, building on what came before while pushing towards something new, like a beautiful, endless game of telephone.