Paperweight c. 1940

Roberta Spicer painted this watercolor of a paperweight, and like all paintings, it's less about the thing itself, and more about the making of an image of a thing. I can imagine Spicer in her studio, circling this object, trying to work out how to flatten something three-dimensional onto a piece of paper! She’s carefully traced the forms, feather by feather, edge by edge, in a muted palette of white, grey, and gold. But this paperweight! I wonder what Spicer might have been thinking. Was this a gift? An object from her childhood? But painting is about so much more than replicating something realistically, isn’t it? It’s about feeling, about a personal connection between artist and object. The artist is in dialogue with other artists across time, all in pursuit of different ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Painting is a form of embodied expression, open to multiple interpretations.