Seiners 1917

This is 'Seiners' by Philip Little, and it's an etching on paper. Look at the dense clusters of lines, almost scribbles, that make up the dark, brooding mountains. I imagine Little hunched over a metal plate, scratching away with a needle, building up this world of tone and texture. He's got these little boats, packed with figures, mirroring on the water, which are all created through this vocabulary of tiny marks. I think, what was it like for him? The concentration, the physical effort. What was the sensation of the needle biting into the metal? The dark and light, the reflections, it feels like he’s searching for something, maybe a sense of place, a memory, a feeling. Artists, like Philip Little, are always speaking to each other across time and space, riffing off each other's ideas. The ways artists find to translate the world, you know, it helps us to see it anew.