Chest 1935 - 1942

Curator: Look at this lovely drawing. It's called "Chest," attributed to D.P. Jones, and was likely made between 1935 and 1942. There's a distinct folk-art quality to it. Editor: It does have a sweet, storybook feel. The colors are muted and warm. All that repetitive ornamentation—the flowers, the scrolls—creates such a sense of cozy containment. It feels like looking at a very ornate, hand-painted greeting card, with slightly wobbly lines. Curator: Indeed! It's categorized as a drawing. Can you delve a little more into that, thinking about material qualities and how it might fit in that framework of decorative folk painting and genre art? Editor: Right, so if we're talking about it being "just" a drawing... I immediately think of the labor. I can envision the painstaking work to produce those perfectly uniform decorative motifs over and over, rendered presumably by hand with careful attention to replicating forms, which seems in such opposition to machine made, commercially produced decor. Then that odd boat filled with tiny, almost identical men floating inside the chest or drawer -- so the question becomes: what would it hold and what story might the figures contained tell? Curator: I am fond of the figures! There's a kind of melancholy uniformity there. You know, the 'Chest' is evocative – the question is what kind of "chest" we are referring to. Are we looking at a treasure chest holding our common heritage, or some intimate container? Editor: Or perhaps a hope chest for containing a dowry – thus securing an imagined future in objects and images and patterns. Curator: I never thought about that before, very insightful! It's interesting how art can hold space for the future that the artist imagined or aspired to. It certainly enriches our understanding of material life and the things people invest meaning in. Thank you for shedding a new light to this beautiful, seemingly straightforward, drawing.