Bedspread c. 1937

Margery Parish made this "Bedspread" with paint, maybe watercolor, and ink on paper. I wonder about the act of making it; was she sitting at a table, carefully rendering each letter and animal, building up layer upon layer of these horizontal bands? I like the idea of her patiently, even obsessively, repeating these forms and words, creating this intricate, almost map-like surface. Look how the reds, greens, and yellows vibrate against the white ground, giving the whole thing a kind of optical buzz. I'm drawn to the way the text becomes almost like a pattern, the words blurring into abstract shapes. I feel like Parish is having a conversation with folk art traditions, maybe with the kind of obsessive mark-making you see in outsider art. There's a real energy here, a kind of raw, unfiltered expression that I find really compelling. It reminds me that artists are always in dialogue, riffing off each other's ideas across time and space.