Chest c. 1937

Charles Squires made this drawing of a chest, we don't know when and with what exactly, but it looks like colored pencil on paper. It's an interesting rendition, but kind of dry, precise, a record of an object. I feel for Charles, trying to capture all those details, the carved wood, the shadows, the grain. He’s using a fairly tight palette of browns and tans, working hard to get the perspective right. I wonder what he was thinking as he made it? Was it a commission? Was he trying to improve his draughtsmanship skills? There's a feeling of reverence for craft in this work. Think about how Squires looked at a physical, three-dimensional object and tried to capture its essence on a two-dimensional plane. In this piece, he creates a translation of object to image, and in the process shares a kind of feeling. It makes me think about how all artists, in their own way, are constantly inspired by one another across time.