Candlestick c. 1936

James O'Mara created this drawing of a Candlestick, its date unknown. It’s all about the way the light hits that brassy surface, isn’t it? The drawing feels like a record of O'Mara’s looking, his process of trying to capture that gleam. Notice how the artist uses these thin, precise pencil lines to map out the object. But then, the gold tone is built up through careful gradations and the softest of shadows. The colour and line create two different levels of information, fighting with each other on the surface of the paper, as the process of seeing battles with the desire to fix something in place. I keep thinking about the slight unevenness of the golden layer and how much life it gives the work. It puts me in mind of some of the technical drawings of Leonardo, or maybe even the architectural studies of Agnes Martin, the way she reduced buildings to their bare essentials. The Candlestick offers a conversation about precision versus intuition, about how we see and what we choose to record.