Silver Sugar Bowl c. 1936

This is Aaron Fastovsky's drawing of a silver sugar bowl, rendered with graphite or pencil on paper. I’m interested in how artists choose to represent everyday objects, and what that says about them. Take this sugar bowl – It’s pretty ornate, a bit old-fashioned, like something you’d see in a still life from another era. The artist has taken great care to show its sheen, the way the light hits the metal and creates these soft gradients. You can see the patience and precision involved in building up the tones, mimicking the reflective surface. I wonder what Fastovsky was thinking when he made this? Was he interested in the play of light, or the history of the object itself? Maybe he was thinking about the tradition of still life painting, and how artists have always found beauty in the mundane. It feels like a conversation with artists from the past, all those painters who spent hours studying the way light falls on a simple object.