Coffee Grinder c. 1941

Pearl Davis made this drawing of a Coffee Grinder, sometime between 1855 and 1995, but we don’t know exactly when or with what. You can see how Davis built up this image stroke by stroke. It's a patient process, really meditative when you think about it. What’s cool about the piece is how the texture of the wood comes through. The density of marks on the wheel, and the build up of tone on the lower section, you get a real sense of the object’s physical presence. Those dark accents, just on the lip of the grinder, give the whole thing weight and grounding. They also reveal a wonderful economy of line. Looking at Davis’s drawing I think of, oh, maybe Giorgio Morandi, with his still life arrangements of bottles and bowls. But what Davis does is so immediate, so direct, you can feel a human connection to the object. I mean, it's just a coffee grinder, but somehow it’s also much more.