Pot Trivet c. 1939

Benjamin Resnick's Pot Trivet, rendered sometime in the twentieth century, is an exercise in observation, a quiet study in pencil on paper. You can almost feel Resnick's hand moving slowly, deliberately across the page. The texture is where it's at for me. Look at the subtle gradations of tone that give the trivet its three-dimensional form. The stippled effect, the way the pencil marks build up density, makes the metal feel weighty and solid. And the light! It hits the surface just so, creating a sense of depth and volume that's almost sculptural. It reminds me of the drawings of Vija Celmins, who took humble, everyday objects and turned them into these monumental studies of light and shadow. The trivet itself, it is a humble, functional object. But in Resnick's hands, it becomes something more, a meditation on form, light, and the quiet beauty of the everyday.