Blanket 1935 - 1942

This is Ethel Dougan's watercolor of a blanket. The horizontal bands of color feel so grounded, like she’s trying to capture something fundamental about how a blanket sits, how it’s both flat and voluminous. The paint is applied with a real attention to texture, almost a desire to mimic the weave of the original textile. If you look closely, you can see how each individual mark builds up the overall image, there's a real patience to the work. The colors are quite muted overall, but those flashes of orange, blue and red in the zigzags really sing out from that background. It's like she’s trying to honor the object, but in her own voice. Seeing this, I think about Anni Albers. Both artists, in their own way, used geometric abstraction to explore the language of textiles and convey something about the relationship between handmade objects and our lived experience. Art isn’t about answers, it’s about asking questions.