Boy's Suit 1935 - 1942

This rendering of a boy's suit, we think by Ruggiero Pierotti, is mostly pale browns and whites, kind of like faded sepia photographs. I can imagine the artist carefully layering the paint, building up the shadows to give the velvet jacket its rich texture. Those vertical stripes on the trousers must have been tedious, each one considered and placed just so. You know, painting clothes is always a challenge because you’re also painting a person who isn’t there. What kind of kid would wear this, I wonder? And those little buttons – each one a tiny sphere of light and dark. It's like Pierotti is saying, 'Look closely, there's beauty even in the mundane.' It reminds me of some of Fairfield Porter’s domestic scenes, that same attention to the details of daily life. Artists, we're all just magpies, picking up shiny bits and bobs from each other's nests! We all share a common language of mark making, pushing paint around to tell our stories, over and over.