Blue Plate 1940

Editor: So, here we have Leon Kelly’s “Blue Plate” from 1940, rendered in charcoal and drawing. I am particularly taken by its stark monochromatic scheme, which casts a rather pensive mood. What strikes you when you look at this, let’s say, humble arrangement of everyday objects? Curator: Humble indeed, and yet! To me, the magic is in how Kelly elevates the mundane. It’s like he's whispering, "Look closer." The bold charcoal strokes feel both raw and deliberate. I imagine him, maybe on a rainy afternoon, utterly absorbed in capturing the way light plays across those glasses, that luscious looking bowl. Does it almost feel like he’s not just drawing, but remembering a memory? Editor: That's a great way to put it, like remembering. Do you mean that there is some Surrealism here, the artist recreating and maybe slightly altering what they see? Curator: Absolutely. I like that you used that term. It feels both like the real world and an abstraction of it. He's finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, I’m reminded a bit of Morandi's bottles actually. Perhaps the ‘blue plate’ isn't actually blue at all. Or perhaps, that absence of color is making a point about memory itself – hazy, dreamlike, filtering out certain hues… Editor: That is deep, that objects like that are hazy by definition and not reality. What did we learn here, I wonder. Curator: We discovered the unexpected poetry of still life!