J. Dyckman Estate c. 1936

Gilbert Sackerman made this estate plan with what looks like watercolor and ink. It's laid out as a bird’s eye view, a real slice of life, but not quite, because there is a kind of heraldic crest at the top, which makes it both a real estate plan and something more…symbolic. I’m thinking about Sackerman, imagining him marking out the gardens and the little houses with their red roofs. There’s a big green space, some roads, and then these rectangular plots with rows of plants. I wonder if he was thinking about mapping, about nature, and about ownership. The colors are muted, almost pastel – pinks, greens, blues. The light touch of the brush makes it airy, floaty. The flat, somewhat naive style reminds me of some folk art, but the geometry of the plots is modernist. There’s something about the co-mingling of natural forms and heraldic, geometric, architectural forms that is really interesting. It suggests that Sackerman was maybe inspired by a whole range of different ways of image making.