Wedding Dress c. 1939

Nancy Crimi made this watercolour painting of a ‘Wedding Dress’ sometime during her lifetime. I find it quite a delicate image. You can see the almost imperceptible marks of the pencil, the tiny brushstrokes of colour. It’s as if the dress is emerging softly into being, through the artist's quiet and deliberate process. I can imagine Nancy Crimi, thinking of her own wedding, or perhaps the wedding of a loved one, and then carefully rendering the material of the dress in her minds eye. What’s so interesting about the ruffles and the pleats is the way they gently suggest form. You can almost feel the texture of the fabric, the delicate lace trimming. Painters are always in conversation with one another, across time, and there is something in this painting that chimes with so many. The quietude and the sense of light and shadow in Morandi, or the quiet interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi. Painting gives us a way of thinking and feeling, of taking an idea and turning it into something else.