Jug c. 1936

John Dana painted this jug with brown and white watercolor. I can imagine him, brush in hand, carefully building up the curves and contours of this curious object. It seems almost like a study in how to represent a three-dimensional object on a flat plane. He's created a kind of double vision here, hasn't he? There’s the jug itself, adorned with relief images of animals – are those wolves? – and then, up in the corner, a little inset, like a detail blown up for closer inspection. Maybe Dana was thinking about surface versus depth, or the way details can change our perception of the whole. The brown monochrome palette keeps it all unified, like a memory or a dream, each stroke feeling tentative yet precise. It reminds me of Morandi and his still-life paintings of bottles, how he returned to the same subjects over and over, each time finding something new. Dana’s jug feels like it’s part of that conversation, that long, ongoing exchange between artists trying to capture something essential about the world around them. It's a conversation that's always evolving, always open to new voices and perspectives.