Young America Bank c. 1937

Clementine Fossek rendered these drawings of a series of small painted metal safes in ink and watercolor. I'm trying to imagine what Fossek was thinking about when she made these studies. I see a woman who is carefully observing. There's a certain amount of visual information that she's interested in. The light, the three-dimensionality of the safes, the shapes and patterns, and how to describe all of that, and the material itself. I imagine a really curious person with a really good eye trying to describe something that she's seeing. And for the artist I can imagine it’s like, you know, she's building up a whole vocabulary of vision, right? I wonder, who else was looking at this stuff and getting inspired? Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's an ongoing exchange. We look, we take, we riff!