Pa. German Plate c. 1940

This Pa. German Plate was painted by Charlotte Sperber, sometime between 1855 and 1995. It is clearly a rendering of a found object, but in its painterly execution it's elevated from documentary to something more imaginative. The brown edging is really what gets me: it’s solid but inconsistent, with little circles of varying shape and size bumping up against one another. Look closely and you can almost feel Sperber turning the plate in her mind. There's a kind of raw openness to how the imagery is laid out here. The surface feels immediate and the brushstrokes give the objects a kind of vibrant energy. The painting almost feels like a coded language. I'm thinking of artists like Forrest Bess, or even Hilma af Klint, both of whom sought to create images as a mode of personal expression that tapped into something universal, something spiritual. Like them, Sperber reminds us that art is always an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas that stretches across time.