Chapel with tracery window 

Curator: The ethereal quality of Karl Ballenberger's "Chapel with Tracery Window" really hits you, doesn't it? Editor: It does have a delicate beauty, this simple pencil drawing; there's something soothing, almost reverent, in the way he's captured the interior architecture. All those pencil lines almost appear mass-produced, in their simple elegance. Curator: For me, I’m transported, imagining sunlight filtering through the stained glass of the window. The precision, the light touch... you can almost hear the echoes in the chapel. Editor: I wonder, though, about the labor that would have gone into both constructing this chapel and in its later depiction here in pencil. There’s this very refined, almost effortless quality in the drawing itself, yet the lines suggest repetitive processes to build this space, stone by stone. I like thinking about the craft aspect, the manual work embedded in it. Curator: Yes, I completely see that—the reverence is almost baked into the making. You can imagine the repetitive gestures required by Ballenberger too, the focused eye, as his pencil meticulously maps the stone tracery, shadows. The commitment involved almost feels like a devotion. Editor: And you've touched on how important material conditions, from the pencil to the chapel's interior, inform our experience of sacred spaces! Curator: It's almost like a hymn of stone and graphite, if I can wax poetic. Editor: Well said. Makes you think about who got to inhabit and enjoy that space—a highly restricted population. And who gets to appreciate Ballenberger’s work now in the museum space. The architecture both includes and excludes... Curator: Yes, that interplay is there in his pencil lines. Seeing that interplay really enriched my understanding of the space represented, but also the man who saw it. Editor: For me, thinking about the hands that made the space as well as drew the image really resonates today. It's art about process and power.