Wool Tablecloth c. 1938

Frank Maurer made this drawing of a wool tablecloth sometime in his long life, and I'm picturing him hunched over it, trying to capture the way the threads weave together. It's not about making it perfect, right? It's about trying to get it down, to understand how the thing is made. The way he's used these soft, reddish marks, you can almost feel the texture of the cloth. And there are these little white gaps in the weaving, and I wonder if he thought about them as flaws or just part of the whole thing? I imagine Maurer, like a lot of artists, was just wrestling with how to see, how to translate what's in front of him onto paper. It's like he's saying, "Here's this simple thing, a tablecloth, but look how complicated it is when you really pay attention." And that's what keeps us all going, the constant conversation across time with other artists, all of us trying to figure out how to see the world.