Bottle 1935 - 1942

Jessica Price’s drawing of a bottle invites us into the world of seeing as a process. Look at the way she teases out the form with a thin, washy green, letting the paper breathe underneath. There’s something about the transparency that really grabs me, it’s like she’s trying to catch the light as it moves through the glass. The color isn’t just laid down, it’s coaxed into being, layer by layer. The bottle itself is rendered with such gentle strokes, it feels almost tentative, like the artist is feeling her way around the object. Notice the darker shadows pooling at the base and along the curves, giving it weight, grounding it. It reminds me a little of Giorgio Morandi, who used a similar subtle approach to make paintings of bottles that seemed to almost disappear. Both artists show us how much can be said with so little, leaving us to fill in the blanks with our own looking.