Cow Bell, #1 c. 1936

Elmer Weise made this watercolor of two cowbells, sometime in the 20th century. It's funny to think about the fact that he was born in 1855 and died in 1995. That’s a heck of a run, so who knows exactly when he made this! What's interesting to me is how the medium, watercolor, is kind of perfect for rendering the way light hits these tarnished metal objects. Look at the way the colors shift from brown to green, suggesting the patina of age. The paint is applied in thin, transparent washes, giving the bells a luminous quality. Each bell is shown with a simple star design on its surface, rendered with the same subtle gradations of tone. These simple shapes repeat, they feel like very pared-down geometric forms in the way that some of Agnes Martin's later paintings would. The softness of the watercolor, so different from the harshness of the metal, allows for a kind of meditation on the relationship between object and image. It’s all about the way we see, and how art transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary.