Drawer Pull c. 1936

Janet Riza made this drawing of a Drawer Pull sometime in the twentieth century. Look at the even, light touch of the painting and the way the object appears to be rendered in three dimensions. I wonder if Riza ever thought of the golden-brown pigment as a kind of sculptural material. You can see how she built up form with tiny strokes, so that it seems to exist not only as a color but as a kind of volume. Riza was probably thinking about how to depict form in a way that was both descriptive and interpretive. Like many artists, she was working out how to translate the world onto a flat surface. It's a question artists have been grappling with for centuries! Her art feels connected to other artists who've explored similar questions, exchanging ideas across time. Ultimately, what Riza invites is a kind of looking that is also a way of feeling, of imagining, and of understanding the world through the eyes of another.