Knife Sharpener c. 1939

Lionel Ritchey made this watercolor of a knife sharpener, and it just hums with the beauty of the everyday. It's not splashy, but there's a quiet kind of looking going on here. I love how the brown of the handle is worked in layers, not flat or even, you can almost feel the wood grain. The stone itself has all these tiny, tiny marks, like he wanted to show us every little bit of texture. This is such an ordinary object, right? But Ritchey makes you see how even the most useful things can be kind of special, worth really seeing. That rough surface of the stone, built up from tiny little touches of paint, it feels solid, real. It reminds me of Fairfield Porter, that same attention to the stuff of normal life, like he's saying, hey, look closer, there's beauty everywhere. It's like Ritchey's inviting us to slow down, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.