Bell - From Swedish Church c. 1936

This rendering of a bell from a Swedish Church is by Wellington Blewett. There’s something about the drawing of functional things that always gets me, maybe because it’s a cousin of abstraction—taking an object and flattening it into something else. This is a bell, yes, but it's also a study in form and light, all those subtle gradations of tone bringing the metal to life on the page. I wonder what Blewett was thinking about as he worked. Was he focused on accuracy, or was he also trying to capture something of the bell’s spirit, its potential for sound? I can imagine him, pencil in hand, carefully mapping out the curves and lines, getting lost in the details, almost like meditation. It reminds me that all art, even the most representational, is also about abstraction, about taking the world and turning it into something new.