Pa. German Chest c. 1940

Carl Strehlau made this watercolour on paper drawing of a Pa. German Chest sometime between 1855 and 1995, those are the years he lived, not necessarily when he made this work. Anyway, you can see how Strehlau layers the colours, one on top of the other, to make the image shift and emerge. I can just picture Strehlau thinking, "How can I represent this object? What does it mean to me?" The colour palette is muted and organic, while the marks are gestural and playful. I wonder what he was thinking when he painted those pillar shapes, each with a flower shooting up from the centre. Were they signifiers of something, or pure decoration? Each mark is a building block, a brushstroke which communicates feeling. The textures are created through layering and juxtaposition, and I am able to trace the process of his decision-making through them. Strehlau probably saw himself in conversation with other artists, and the image exists as part of a long tradition of artists copying, borrowing, and remixing one another's ideas. There is so much room for interpretation and exchange!