Sugar Dipper c. 1939

Annie B. Johnston made this watercolour of a sugar dipper on paper, but its exact date is unknown. The colour palette is really limited here, mostly browns and neutrals, but look how she coaxes volume from the dipper’s bowl. There are subtle shifts from lighter to darker tones that give it a real sense of depth. You can almost feel the scoop in your hand. I think Johnston really gets the materiality of the object. There’s a granular quality to the paint, a sense of texture that makes the metal feel almost porous. And that handle—it’s so simple, yet she’s captured the way light plays on the wood. That dark line along the rim of the bowl? It’s not just outlining; it suggests a kind of worn edge. Johnston is working in a similar vein to other American Precisionists like Charles Sheeler. But unlike them she doesn't flatten things so much, rather allowing them to have a worn out depth. Both are using painting as a way of looking closely at the world, so we can too.