Hat c. 1937

Ann Gene Buckley’s watercolor, Hat, is a simple painting of a complex thing: a hat. Look at that blue, how it pools and spreads, almost like ink bleeding into water. You can see the hand in the process, can't you? It’s there in the way the paint soaks into the paper, a soft caress of color. And that netting, so carefully rendered, each tiny square a testament to Buckley's attention. The way Buckley handles the blue, it's not just a color, it's a feeling. Think about the way Agnes Martin used grids, or how Florine Stettheimer painted portraits. It’s a bit like that, where the everyday becomes something else, something more. You could say that the hat, and the painting, is an object and an idea. The painting is a conversation that keeps going, one brushstroke at a time.