Salt Shaker 1935 - 1942

Wellington Blewett made this Salt Shaker, we don't know when, but it's rendered in watercolor. I love how Blewett goes at it with these delicate washes, building up the form so gently. There's something magical in the way the grey paint suggests a reflective surface, that he makes something solid out of an almost-nothing. The face on the shaker is split in two and this is a work of doubled vision. I think of the way a drawing or painting of a head becomes an uncanny object. He transforms the everyday object into an icon, or maybe an idol. It is so curious! I see a relationship between Blewett’s close observation and the drawings of everyday objects by surrealist artists like Giorgio de Chirico, who was always interested in the kind of hidden reality that comes from taking a good hard look. Painting, after all, is about seeing.