Drawer Pull c. 1936

Janet Riza made this drawing of a drawer pull at some point in her long life. I can imagine her, sitting, quietly making tonal variations in the burnished gold metal, a still-life. Did she have a favorite drawer that she painted this from, I wonder? Here is a functional object, drawn in a functional way—clearly describing the object to be made, to be used. What a fascinating shift from the pure emotion of color field painting—this is like the anti-Abstract Expressionist painting, but one that quietly celebrates the useful, the made, and the precision of descriptive work. Artists are magpies; they steal images and ideas from all over the place, from the high and low. It all gets scrambled up in the work in the studio. One form of painting suggests another, as if painters are in an ongoing conversation through time.