Shaker Cabinet c. 1937

Winslow Rich painted this ‘Shaker Cabinet’ and it feels so full of tender attentiveness, doesn't it? I can imagine Rich carefully mixing those warm, honeyed tones to find the right expression for this wood. The way he describes the vertical panels on the doors, each with subtle variations in shade, feels like he’s honoring the material, giving space for the natural beauty of the wood grain to breathe through the paint. There’s a real reverence here, a kind of quiet observation that reminds me of Agnes Martin’s subtle grids or even some of Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes. It’s a painting about seeing, and about the simple, understated elegance of functional objects. Rich isn’t just painting a cabinet; he’s painting the light on a cabinet, the feeling of a cabinet, the very essence of cabinet-ness. It is something so quietly profound. It’s like he's saying, "look, really look," and in that looking, we might just find something extraordinary.