Beaker c. 1937

Aaron Fastovsky made this drawing of a Beaker sometime in the 20th century, with what looks like graphite on paper. It’s like he's trying to capture the way light bends and reflects, almost like a photographic study, but rendered by hand, you know? I imagine him squinting, really looking, trying to decode how a simple object transforms in different lights. You see the way the graphite softly graduates from dark to light, trying to describe a surface that’s actually quite reflective. I wonder if he thought of it as a simple exercise, or if he was after something more. Maybe he felt kinship with those early still-life painters? It’s interesting how a seemingly straightforward rendering of an everyday item opens up all these little questions about seeing, representation, and how we look at the world. Artists are always responding to something, and building on what came before.