Churn 1936

Charles Caseau made this watercolor and graphite on paper of a churn. I'm thinking about Caseau at work, lightly sketching the cylindrical form of the churn, then building up the muted greys with thin washes. You can almost feel the paper absorbing the water. The cobalt blue decorations—swooping lines and little raindrop shapes—are so playful against the neutral ground. What’s so charming is the naive rendering of the eagle or bird like design on the front. I imagine Caseau thinking about the churn not just as an object, but as a container of memory, of a certain time and place. I wonder, did he consider how this functional object is also a carrier of cultural meaning? These objects have their own language of form and decoration. It makes me think about how much artists, even now, are in conversation with the past, drawing from it, and reinterpreting it in their own way. Every brushstroke, every decision, is part of an ongoing exchange across time.