Blue and White Homespun c. 1937

William O. Fletcher made this "Blue and White Homespun", and well, the clue is in the title. Here we have this tight composition, a textile swatch of blue and white squares. There is a certain calmness to the colour palette, only two colours, but the artist gets a range of tones from the build-up of fibres. The rhythm of the weave is only broken up by horizontal and vertical bands of white. I love the way that the artist has embraced the grid, but broken it up, each block is ever so slightly different, like a hand-drawn painting. In one area, the blue squares dominate, in another, the white squares are more prominent. The artist is playing with our expectations and testing the limits of his craft. This work reminds me of the textiles of Anni Albers, she of course worked at the Bauhaus in Germany, and this piece is an interesting companion to that body of work. Both artists embrace the process, and the beauty of handmade.