Washington Eagle Flask c. 1942

V.L. Vance made this study of a Washington Eagle Flask, but when? It's undated. We see two views of the same object depicted with delicate blue and black lines. The colour is so diaphanous that the flask seems like it is emerging out of mist. I wonder about the decisions Vance made when they painted this. I imagine him carefully rendering the texture and translucency of the glass, while bringing out the iconography of the flask’s molded design: George Washington on one side and a majestic eagle on the other. I feel the patience and precision that he must have employed to create these images. The subtlety of Vance’s watercolor technique, the way he built up tone and volume with a limited range of colours, reminds me of 18th-century portrait miniatures. It makes me wonder how the process of copying and interpreting an object like this flask can offer us a new way of seeing and understanding it. Artists are always in dialogue with each other, aren't they?