Silver Caster 1936

Louis Annino's rendering of a "Silver Caster" is an exercise in tone, line, and form. It’s that kind of drawing where you can tell the artist is really thinking through the object, trying to understand how light hits its surface. The cool thing here is the subtle gradations of value he achieves with pencil. Look closely, and you can see how he builds up the shading, layering the graphite to give the caster its metallic sheen. It’s almost sculptural, the way he coaxes the three-dimensional form out of the flat paper. I keep thinking about Agnes Martin when I see this, how she used simple lines to create these shimmering, almost ethereal compositions. Annino does something similar here, taking a mundane object and turning it into something quietly beautiful. It's a reminder that art can be found in the everyday, if you just take the time to look.