Derelict - Lake Union Seattle 1936

Edmond James Fitzgerald made this etching, Derelict - Lake Union Seattle, in 1936. Look at the tangle of cross-hatched lines building up the image! I can imagine the artist hunched over the plate, needling in the detail, a bit like drawing but with this real sense of digging in, a kind of controlled destruction. You know, the whole scene feels a bit…forgotten. The title speaks of abandonment, and the old boat mirrors the skeletal structure of the bridge in the background. The vertical marks suggesting reflections in the water are like a kind of weeping. I get the feeling Fitzgerald was trying to capture something melancholic, a sense of time passing, or maybe a comment on the fleeting nature of industry and progress. It makes me think about how we look at industrial images now - they seem very different when viewed through today's climate anxieties. Artists have a way of speaking to each other across the ages, don't they?