Textile c. 1937

Frank Maurer made this artwork called 'Textile' using an unknown medium on paper. The repeating red and blue squares are giving homespun-realness. Each square has this kind of fuzzy halo. I can almost feel the texture of the fabric, its nubbly surface, like something you’d find at a craft fair. Imagine Maurer hunched over this work, obsessively drawing each tiny line to build up the image of a woven textile. What was he thinking about as he worked? Did he have a specific piece of cloth in mind, or was he drawing from memory? I wonder if this process was somehow meditative. There's something very tender about this drawing. It reminds me that artists are always looking, always translating the world around them into their own visual language. It’s like a visual echo, rippling through time and space.