Rectangular Table c. 1939

Ruth Bialostosky's Rectangular Table renders the humble subject of a wooden table in graphite pencil and colored pencil on paper. Look closely, and you can sense Ruth’s hand moving across the paper, translating the three-dimensional form into something flat but illusionistic, alive with tonal variation. You can see the hatching used to build up the form. I bet she was looking really hard. When I make a drawing of something, I have to really look at it in order to understand what I'm seeing. What was she thinking as she rendered each leg? Was she interested in what kind of wood it's made from? She probably had to look at it for a long time in order to be able to draw it in such detail. I wonder if she was thinking about all the tables that have been drawn throughout history? Artists are always in conversation with each other, across time and space, inspiring one another’s creativity. Painting is a form of embodied expression, where ambiguity and uncertainty allow for multiple interpretations.