Wedding Dress 1935 - 1942

Mary Fitzgerald painted this dress in watercolour, and I just want to dive right in and swim around in it! I love how the garment hovers on the paper. Just looking at it, you can almost imagine Mary making the painting, how she built up the image, layer by layer, pushing and pulling, a bit like dressmaking itself. It’s pretty hard to make an image that’s so clearly a dress also feel slightly abstract, and there's something quite vulnerable in the work. It reminds me of some of Agnes Martin's more tender, soft-focus drawings. The tones of pale gold create a shimmering surface that moves from one tone to another, like a Rothko painting. It makes you think about the dress that this painting is based on. Painters are always in conversation with each other, even across time, and that’s what makes art so great. It’s an ongoing investigation.