Wedding Dress c. 1937

Arelia Arbo made this watercolour drawing of a Wedding Dress. It's hard to know exactly when it was made, but she was born in 1855, so it gives you a sense of the world it came from. I look at the way she’s used a light touch of watercolour to capture the flow of the fabric and I think, what was she thinking about? Maybe she felt that a dress is like a sculpture you can wear, a real, tangible thing. This sketch is not just about documenting an object. It's about understanding form, texture, and how light plays on surfaces. The way she's rendered the ruffles with such delicacy reminds me that drawing, like painting, can be a form of inquiry—a way of understanding not just what we see, but how we perceive and interpret the world around us. It speaks to an ongoing conversation between artists, each building on the work of those who came before, adding their unique voice to the chorus.