Suit (Costume) c. 1937

This is Mary E. Humes’s design for a suit or costume, made with watercolor and graphite. What I love about it is how she uses the design as a kind of language. The grey wash of the dress gives a subtle dimensionality, but then you see the decorative black swirls and they’re so bold and flat. These feel like they are almost pasted on, defying the depth of field. They are so graphic and alive! The linear quality gives the feeling that the artist is trying to work something out. You can see this in the repetition of these marks, like an exercise or meditation. This approach is a common language amongst artists, a process that embraces not only precision but also the happy accidents that can arise. The drawing over to the right is a gesture that shows the work in three dimensions, like a flip of a page, but I wonder if it's really the ‘back’ of the drawing or a peek into the future of it, or of the artist herself. Humes is maybe channeling someone like Hilma af Klint, who used art to explore ideas beyond the visible world, a sense of art that looks forward, not back.