Swan, Accordion, and Mercury 1994

Philip Pearlstein made this watercolour painting with a nude, Swan, Accordion, and Mercury. The earth-tone colors of the objects and figure create a muted palette that really emphasizes the texture of the objects; you can almost feel the weave of the accordion and the grain of the wooden sculptures. He layers these objects and the model on top of each other in a shallow picture plane, and it's interesting how the composition brings the disparate objects together. Look at the the foot hovering above the instrument, so delicately rendered, it brings a playful tension to the composition. It reminds me a little bit of Balthus who painted figures in similarly distorted spaces. Painting, like music, is an exchange of ideas through time. It’s never about answers; it’s always about questioning and seeing things from new perspectives.