Wood Box c. 1936

Lawrence Foster’s watercolor, ‘Wood Box’, captures a humble subject with extraordinary care. I imagine him delicately layering washes of warm, earthy tones, the image emerging slowly, shifting between representation and abstraction. I sympathize with Lawrence as he painstakingly captures the light on each surface. The flat planes of the box take on a sculptural quality, while the carefully rendered tools, hanging with an almost melancholic stillness, become characters in a quiet drama. You can almost feel the artist trying to work out, through painting, the quiet poetry of everyday objects. It makes me think about how Giorgio Morandi, another painter who found endless inspiration in humble objects, used a similar palette of muted browns and grays to explore the poetics of form and space. Like Morandi, Foster seems to be in conversation with painting itself, using the medium to question the way we see and experience the world.