Wall Painting 1936

This "Wall Painting" was made by Dayton Brown at some unknown date, probably with gouache and ink on paper. The fragment shows us a leaf pattern in peach and blue and some sort of border in peach, yellow and black. I'm imagining Brown in 1956, carefully making this record of the original wall painting. It's like the artist is a detective trying to work out how it all fits together. The marks here are gentle and exploratory, not trying to reproduce the thing perfectly, more like trying to understand it through feeling. The whole thing feels a bit like unearthing buried treasure. Painters do this all the time. We see something, then we get a feeling about it. A gesture that can communicate feeling, intention, or meaning. Then we try to make that feeling visible with a brush or a pen. It's an embodied expression that embraces ambiguity and uncertainty. That's painting. And that's life.