Native Pine Box 1935 - 1942

E. Boyd made this watercolour painting of a Native Pine Box, sometime between 1855 and 1995. The box is rendered with loose brushwork, and the colours, while muted, have a striking boldness, giving the piece a kind of understated dynamism. The surface is opaque, with dark grounds overlaid with brighter colours to create an image of the box. What I love is the way the artist has approached the problem of symmetry, in that the forms are balanced but not identical, making the box seem even more animated. Look at the flowers, for example, rendered with simple brushstrokes, they become abstract shapes, echoing each other across the surface. The bird, like a pink ghost, brings a sense of lightness and movement. There's a kinship here with the work of Forrest Bess, another artist who combined personal symbolism with painterly abstraction to create unique, visionary works. The Native Pine Box, like Bess’s paintings, invites us to consider the relationship between seeing and believing, between the concrete and the imagined.