10212 („Es ist das grüne Kleid …“) 1930

John Elsas made this watercolour drawing on paper, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. What I like about the piece is the sheer vulnerability and process. Elsas has a fragile touch. The colour palette, mostly pale green, is applied with very light washes of paint which give the figure an almost ethereal quality, like a memory or a ghostly apparition. The title, handwritten at the bottom, translates as "It is the green dress, my life, for hope shall always surround me." You can feel the hopeful yet melancholic mood. The single line forming the platform that the figure stands upon is a nice touch. It's like a stage, a symbolic boundary between reality and imagination. This piece reminds me of the work of Forrest Bess, another artist who made strange, visionary paintings that were deeply personal and psychologically charged. They both embraced the ambiguous, fluid nature of the self, and the power of art to express the inexpressible.