Weather Vane - Cock c. 1938

This ‘Weather Vane - Cock’, was made by Helen Hobart in watercolour. It’s fascinating how she’s captured the cock's form through these delicate washes, it's like she's charting the process of how a form emerges. I'm drawn to the way she renders the tail feathers with these long, almost calligraphic strokes. They remind me of brushstrokes in Chinese landscape painting, where a single line can evoke an entire mountain range. Here, each stroke defines a feather, but together they create this sense of movement, like the rooster is about to crow and take flight. It makes me think about other artists who've been inspired by folk art, like Marsden Hartley, and the way he translated the directness and simplicity of rural art into his own modernist language. It's a reminder that art is always in conversation with itself, with artists borrowing, stealing, and transforming ideas across time. This piece invites us to see the world a little differently, to appreciate the beauty in the everyday, and to recognize the power of simple forms to evoke complex emotions.