Highboy

Elisabeth Fulda made this watercolor of a highboy, a tall chest of drawers, sometime in the 20th century. It's a beautiful, straightforward rendering, but with just enough wabi-sabi charm to make it sing. There's a kind of loving attention to detail in the rendering of the wood grain and the ornate carving. The surface is quite flat, and the paint has a delicate, almost translucent quality. It's hard to tell exactly what kind of brushes Fulda used, but I imagine she might have liked a small, fine brush for the details and a slightly larger one for the broader areas. The way she handles the shadows along the side really brings out the shape of the piece as a whole. I'm also drawn to the handles on the drawers. It reminds me a bit of some of the Shaker artists who would paint furniture—there's a similar kind of reverence for the object. You know, art's just an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time.