Wall Painting c. 1936

Curator: This watercolor drawing, titled "Wall Painting", dates to about 1936, by an artist named Dana Bartlett. What are your initial thoughts on the work? Editor: It feels both decorative and slightly unsettling. The colors are soft, almost pastel, but there's a formality in the arrangement and these...snakes...pouring what, water? Green spit? It's odd. Curator: Indeed. Let's consider the context of this piece. Created in the 1930s, it’s fascinating to see a decorative wall painting in watercolour, perhaps referencing art nouveau or academic styles, when modernism was the prevalent aesthetic. Editor: I am struck by how deliberate each brushstroke seems. Given that it is watercolor on paper, and seemingly preparatory for something much larger – an actual wall perhaps? – you can't hide errors. It demands incredible technical skill. There's the labour, the making of a decoration versus a work in and of itself. How was something like this perceived in relation to mass-produced wall coverings? Curator: An excellent question. Its existence as an autonomous drawing asks us to consider it as more than merely a preliminary design. Instead, the artist, working perhaps during the Great Depression, challenges those divisions and ideas about consumption. Were such hand-crafted artistic elements already giving way to machine-made designs for the home? Editor: And those ram heads on the bowl... Is that a stylized radiator in front? A complex dialogue between luxury, industrial advancement and decoration. Where was this type of ornament going? Were those styles going out of fashion? Curator: Yes, the question of what was fashionable becomes so pertinent here, and raises complex social questions, as Bartlett worked, I imagine, for wealthy patrons eager for traditional decoration, the painting almost acting as a historical document in the present moment. Editor: I can see why it intrigued us! It's a quiet subversion rendered in such delicate, painstaking detail. Curator: Yes, and thinking about the conditions of this image helps us reimagine that domestic setting anew.