Untitled c. 1950s

Ralston Crawford made this untitled drawing with ink on paper, and it’s all about how he approaches the act of seeing. The drawing has a limited palette of black ink on a creamy paper, and it looks like he’s using the simplest of tools, like maybe a fine liner pen, to construct these geometric forms. The network of fine lines creating planes of cross-hatching. Look at the top left, where the lines form this sort of architectural shape. It feels so precise, yet so open to interpretation. Crawford invites us to see the world in a new way. You know, there’s something about the drawing’s simplicity, its starkness, that reminds me of Agnes Martin. Both artists, in their own way, strip things down to their essence, leaving us with something that feels both incredibly precise and deeply emotional. It’s like they’re showing us that sometimes, less really is more.