Salt Shaker c. 1939

Michael Fenga made this drawing of a salt shaker, sometime between 1855 and 1995, in subtle pencil on paper. The overall delicacy of the drawing belies the crispness of the geometry. The zigzags and starbursts march around the body of the shaker with a strange kind of mechanical precision. You can sense the slow, meditative process by which Fenga has built up the image. And the funny thing is, the more I look at this drawing, the more I feel like I’m staring into a crystal ball, with all those intricate patterns pulling you into the centre, but always leading you back to the edges. Like an Agnes Martin grid, it’s a visual structure that invites a feeling of floating, but at the same time it is deeply grounded in the real.