Man's Bolero c. 1936

Syrena Swanson made this watercolor of a bolero at an unknown date. It’s like she’s thinking through the process of how this garment is made, and the kind of moves you make when you're putting this kind of decoration on a jacket. There's this sense of layering; the way the white embellishment sits on the darker surface of the jacket and it makes it feel as if we are looking at a diagram. It is very flat, frontal, but it gives you all the information you need. The small, delicate flourishes on the cuffs look like musical notations, they’re a dance in themselves. Swanson’s piece reminds me of the work of Christina Ramberg, who makes paintings of the back views of women wearing constricting clothes. There is something of that tension here, the way an item of clothing both decorates and contains us. It’s a picture, but a picture with a pulse, and a great reminder that there are many ways of thinking about painting, seeing and being.