City Garden c. 1936

Gilbert Sackerman made this watercolor, titled "City Garden," at an unknown date. Watercolor is a particularly interesting medium. It requires the artist to work with the flow of the pigment, almost collaborating with the material itself. In this image, Sackerman coaxes the medium to become a very convincing depiction of wisteria. You can almost feel the gentle cascade of the blossoms. But the real subject here isn’t so much the beauty of nature as it is the juxtaposition of the natural and built environments. The façade of the building is given the same delicate, considered treatment as the flowers. It gives you the sense that even urban structures, when observed closely, are as full of nuance as anything in the natural world. Sackerman asks us to reconsider our understanding of both.