Dress c. 1936

Herbert Marsh rendered this dress in watercolor, and you can see the under drawing in pencil just behind it. I’m thinking about the artist and the work that went into capturing all those stripes, and how this piece is somehow about the pleasure of making as much as the dress itself. You know, paintings are conversations; artists respond to each other across time. I see echoes of Agnes Martin's grids in those rhythmic lines. But Marsh is capturing a real object—fabric, texture, the way the skirt flares out. There's something so satisfying about the repetition, the slight imperfections in each line that reveal the hand of the artist. And look at how the colors shift, that subtle range of reds and whites giving the whole dress a kind of shimmering, vibrating quality. It’s like Marsh is not just showing us a dress, but the very act of seeing it, and feeling it.