Wedding Dress 1940

Mary E. Humes made this drawing of a wedding dress, perhaps to be stitched by hand. I wonder, what does the dress want? It’s a dress that looks like it wants to keep its secrets – the secrets of the body it will contain. Humes coaxes the paper with a quiet confidence. What would it have been like to watch her make this? I imagine her gentle hand moving softly across the surface of the paper, sketching the delicate lines of the dress. There is a stillness in the image, an anticipation of something about to happen – a sacred promise. I think of the many hands that will work on this dress to bring it to life, and the hands that will later undress the bride on her wedding night. Humes, with her patient hatching and cross-hatching, invites us to think about the intimacy of this garment. What would it be like to wear it? What hopes would you have? Across time, artists respond to one another’s creativity. I wonder what this artist might think of my paintings, the shapes and figures that emerge from the canvas, like this dress emerging from the paper, like a bride from her old life, and into a new one.