Five Composition Studies c. 1940s

Ralston Crawford made these five composition studies with ink on paper. You know, when I look at this, I don’t see a fixed idea but a series of attempts, a try-out of different ways to look at the same thing. Crawford, like other painters such as Mondrian and Malevich, seemed to be interested in the bones of things, the underlying structures. What does a building look like if you take away the bricks and mortar, and just leave the scaffolding? Here the lines are spare and clean. I love that sense of reduction, as though he’s trying to distill the essence of form. And yet, there's also a warmth to it, a human touch. Crawford's studies remind me that painting is an ongoing experiment, each artist building on the discoveries of those who came before, participating in a larger conversation about how we see and interpret the world.