Grotesque Jug c. 1938

George Loughridge painted this Grotesque Jug with watercolor on paper, and what strikes me about this piece is its stillness and stillness of its subject, like a found object captured in paint. Imagine Loughridge’s curiosity in rendering this strange vessel—he’s probably thinking about the light as it hits the surface, how the shadows define its oddly shaped features: the eyes, nose and grimace-like mouth. The paint is thin, yet precise, giving the jug a ghostly, almost transparent quality. It reminds me of the quiet observation in Giorgio Morandi's still-life paintings of bottles and jars, but here, there’s a touch of the uncanny. Loughridge captures something essential about the human impulse to create and distort. This is a kind of alchemy where ordinary objects can become containers of meaning, echoing other ceramic artists who explore the grotesque and the beautiful. In this way, artists speak to each other across time.