Powder Horn c. 1936

Vincent Murphy made this painting of a powder horn; it's a watercolor with graphite and touches of gouache on paper, isn't it lovely? I see Murphy carefully rendering light and shadow, and I wonder if he was interested in the tension between precision and something more dreamlike, something evocative. Look at the texture, the way it suggests a worn, tactile object, and then the fineness of the details that he must have laboured over. Did he lose himself in the object as he was creating it? Did it become a stand in for something else, some other idea? It makes me think about all the ways we try to hold onto the past, how we look back and translate things from one form to another. We take what's real and imbue it with feeling, and transform it into story.