Valentine c. 1937

This is 'Valentine,' by Ernest A. Towers Jr., made with watercolor, graphite, and colored pencil on paper. Look at the patience in this piece! I imagine Towers bent over a table, carefully building the composition bit by bit. Each shape, each color choice, laid down with intention. There's something so deeply meditative about the repetitive motifs—the eagles, the birds, the stylized trees. They're all contained within these circles that are evenly spaced out. You can feel Towers’s hand moving across the paper. It reminds me of some of the work of Forrest Bess, who was also interested in symbols. Towers is creating his own language, his own personal symbolism in this work. What's it like to dive into one's own psyche? How does this affect how we see the world around us, the way it comes out in our paintings? There is nothing like the feeling of drawing or painting something, and watching it slowly come into being in front of you.