Baby's Shirt c. 1936

Sylvia Dezon made this drawing of a baby’s shirt in pencil on paper, and it feels both intimate and a little haunting. The pale pencil lines delicately map out the shape of the garment, a simple, almost ghostly form against the off-white ground. Imagine Dezon, pencil in hand, gently coaxing this image into being. It reminds me of Agnes Martin’s subtle pencil grids, but here, instead of abstraction, we have something so human, so tender. What was Dezon thinking as she rendered each tiny ruffle and fold? Was it an act of preservation, of memory? The shirt feels like a stand-in for something more, a placeholder for a child, a moment, a life. It’s like a whisper across time, connecting us to the quiet, everyday moments of someone else’s existence. Painting, like life, is about exchange, about the seen and the unseen, where meaning is never fixed but always evolving.