Shoulder Plane c. 1937

Natalie Simon made this watercolor of a shoulder plane, but when? It is not stated in the metadata. Anyway, it's really cool. I love the way that Natalie thinks about how the curves of the wood fit into the overall structure. I can imagine her, sitting in the studio, hunched over the paper, trying to figure out how to translate the object in front of her into marks on paper. Maybe she was thinking about how the light hit the wood, or how to capture the feeling of the object in a non-illusory space. Painting is such a mysterious process, you know? We look at something in the world and then we attempt to transform it into something else using colour, texture, and form. It is an act of translation that is never quite complete. But, it's always a kind of magic.