Ten Dreadful Forks

I have always really disliked drawing forks.  I would say to myself "I can't draw a fork" and believe that I couldn't.  Tonight as we sat waiting for our food in a restaurant, I started drawing the fork in front of me, and I thought that it was ridiculous that after all these thousands of drawings I still feel pathetic at fork drawing.  If a student said to me "I can't draw forks" I would say, "Draw ten and you'll be good at drawing them."  So when we got home I dragged eight different forks out of the silverware drawer and began to study them.  I began to see subtle things about them that I had never bothered to look at before:  a curve here, a dip here, the interesting way the shadow works under the upper curve of the handle.

So here are the ten:  from the left, two restaurant forks, a little bone fork that I bought at a Ten Thousand Villages store and that all the children in our family have enjoyed using; a lemon fork in Danish Modern sterling;  a very ornate Francis I fork that P bought when he was single and had decided to buy sterling for himself instead of waiting to get married to stop eating with plastic from take-out; my grandmother's salad fork, one of a set of eight, silver-plate, early 20th century;  dinner fork in Danish Modern sterling;  an orphaned fork that was left at our house after a pot luck and never claimed;  another orphan;  our current stainless, a salad fork, very sleek and heavy and shiny.