Cigar Store Indian 1935 - 1942

This watercolor of a Cigar Store Indian is like a memory, fading at the edges, trying to hold onto something. I wonder what this anonymous artist was thinking, painstakingly rendering this figure with such care. Look at the way the light hits the feathers in his headdress, the determined set of his jaw. It's not just a copy, but a translation. The artist is wrestling with how to represent a representation, like a game of telephone stretching across history. I can imagine the artist carefully mixing the browns and yellows, trying to capture the texture of the wood, the weight of the object. The paint is thin, almost translucent, giving the figure a ghostly quality. Each brushstroke is a tiny act of empathy. It's as if they are asking, "What does it mean to see, to be seen, to be remembered?" This artist, like all artists, is in conversation with the past.