Hobby Horse 1935 - 1942

Adele Brooks made this delicate watercolor on paper depicting a wooden toy. I bet she noticed how the wood grain adds lines to the body of the horse, and how the sawed edges and joints form planes. She's not trying to trick the eye. This isn't a photorealist painting, it is more conceptual than that. I can imagine Adele taking her time, carefully mixing her colors, and patiently building up the image with thin washes. I bet she stared at that toy for hours. It's a very quiet work, and the colours are muted, but I can tell she really saw it. Her Hobby Horse reminds me of work by outsider artists like Bill Traylor who also turned to art-making later in life, finding a way to record their world in simple, yet powerful images. Painting is a conversation across time, and this horse gallops right into the middle of it.