Toast Rack c. 1938

Bernard Westmacott made this drawing of a Toast Rack, but we don't know exactly when or with what. The delicacy of the lines! It makes you think about the process of looking, of really seeing something, and the translation from eye to hand. The drawing is precise yet tentative, like a slow dance between observation and mark-making. The gray tones are subtle, almost ghostly. There’s something about the way the rack is rendered, suspended in this pale space, that makes it feel both present and absent. Look at the circles sitting on top of the rack element: they're like little, repetitive meditations on form, but also echo the shape of toast. I am reminded a little of the drawings of Vija Celmins, who took similarly painstaking approaches to rendering objects and surfaces from the everyday world. But where Celmins had a high-modernist interest in the play of perception, Westmacott seems more interested in the qualities of line itself.