Jardiniere c. 1936

Frank Fumagalli made this drawing of a Jardiniere, we don't know when exactly, but it's a snapshot of the object's design, a kind of material imagining. Look at the watercolor washes. They build up this vision in layers and remind us that the object itself will be built up in a similar way. It is as if the clay itself has been liquefied and run across the surface of the paper. I'm thinking about Fumagalli, as someone who maybe wasn't so famous as the maker of the object, just the recorder of it. I see the careful variations in tone and shadow that describe the curves of the Jardiniere's form. But really, it is the mark-making that I'm interested in. The surface of the rendering contains all these little granular deposits of pigment, like a swarm of tiny particles has landed on the page and clustered together in the darker areas. It brings to mind the work of Agnes Martin, who used similar granular marks to describe form, and similarly created a sense of stillness.