Silver Ladle c. 1937

Hester Duany made this drawing of a silver ladle with graphite on paper. What strikes me is how humble it is. It's a drawing of an everyday object, but it’s rendered with such care. The shading gives the ladle a kind of gentle weight, and you can almost feel the cool smoothness of the metal. It makes you think about craft, about the labor and love that goes into making something functional also beautiful. Look closely, and you can see the small details of the handle, the way it flares out at the end. It feels so precise, and so considered. It reminds me a little bit of the drawings of cutlery by Claes Oldenburg. But where Oldenburg’s work is all about exaggeration and Pop Art irony, this feels more grounded. I think it speaks to a different kind of sensibility, one that finds beauty in the simple things. It’s a quiet, unassuming work, but it lingers in the mind.