Watercolor 1908

This watercolor was made in 1905 by an anonymous artist. I am immediately drawn to the graphic directness of the lines in this piece. There is something so assured about the way they carefully lay out the patterns of the Navajo textile. When you look at the black outlines of the diamond shapes on the bottom half of the image, you can see a slight tremble in the artist’s hand. This is not a flawless mechanical reproduction, but a record of a human encounter with another work of art. I think the artist here is asking us to see the relationships between color and form, to register how the red and black interact with the white space to make a composition. The date in the top right corner tells us this work was made over one hundred years ago, but that doesn’t stop it from speaking to us now. It reminds us that art is like a conversation between people across time, an ongoing exchange of shapes, colors, and ideas.