Churn c. 1936

Frank Fumagalli made this watercolour of a churn, sometime before he died in 1995. It's how he saw the world. Look at the way he's layered his colours, not trying to imitate the object so much as find a correspondence in his medium. It reminds me of Morandi, a similar interest in shape and hue. There's something about the way Fumagalli’s put the blue on the bottom, bleeding into the brown, which gives it weight. Like he's imagining the cool depths of the milk as it separates. The symmetry of the churn, its smooth, cool surface, the subtle shifts in tone: it’s all very satisfying. It's a quiet, meditative study of everyday life. There's no attempt to make this churn pretty or impressive, it just *is.* And in that simplicity, there's a kind of beauty.