China Cupboard c. 1939

Edward Darby made this drawing of a China Cupboard, but the date it was made is unknown, and it was made with watercolor and graphite on paper. The whole composition lives somewhere between representation and abstraction, with the use of a pared-down color palette, and the reduction of a thing in the world to an arrangement of marks. Notice the overall texture; the slight inconsistencies in the brown tones. Look closely and you see the way the grain of the wood is represented through thin layered washes of paint that allow the paper to show through. Think about how the artist translated a large, three-dimensional, wooden object into a light, flat, translucent image. The artist is building up the image bit by bit, like layers of sediment. The subject matter and process remind me of furniture drawings by Mike Kelley, or even some of the architectural renderings by Agnes Martin. It all speaks to the life of art as a conversation across time, and the idea that meaning is never really fixed.