Fan c. 1936

This is Jessie M. Benge's 'Fan', made with what looks like pencil and watercolor on paper. What strikes me is the contrast between the sketched, almost architectural diagram up top, and the beautifully rendered fan itself. Benge really dives into the material aspects of the fan. Look at the detailed rendering of the fan’s delicate structure. It’s almost as if she’s reverse-engineering the fan in her mind, figuring out how all the pieces fit together. The scene depicted on the fan has this dreamlike quality, like a memory or a fantasy. That top part though, is it a sketch, a note, or a ghost of another idea? It leaves you with this feeling that art is a constant exploration, a conversation between ideas, between the functional and the beautiful, never quite settled. Like a half-remembered dream. It reminds me a little of some of Man Ray's works on paper. Art is just an echo chamber of ideas across time, isn't it?