Bare Shouldered Beauty 1967

Suellen Rocca made this print, "Bare Shouldered Beauty," sometime during her lifetime. It’s awash in blue—a soothing, almost melancholic hue—populated with these playful, quirky, almost childlike symbols. Looking at the surface, you can see the texture of the paper coming through the ink, giving the whole thing a kind of ghostly, ephemeral quality. The blue ink pools in the etched lines creating a relief effect. The way these images are arranged, like a sort of inventory, makes me think of outsider art, or maybe even some surrealist games. Take that figure in the bottom left, the one who gives the artwork it's title. She's not quite solid, more like a suggestion of a person, outlined with this delicate, wavering line. It reminds me of Joan Miró, of how he used simple shapes to evoke these dreamy, otherworldly scenes. Ultimately, it’s the ambiguity of Rocca’s work that really captivates me. It's an invitation to wander, to invent your own stories, to find your own beauty in the unexpected.