Bait Gatherers c. 1939

Albert James Webb made this print called *Bait Gatherers* using etching, I guess, sometime in the twentieth century. I love the way this artwork just barely hangs in there, like a half-remembered dream. Look at those clouds scraped over the surface. It makes me think of Turner and Constable, British painters who really went after the sky. I imagine Webb, bending over a copper plate, trying to coax out the memory of a place. How he might have been thinking about light and shadow and how those can conjure a whole mood. I think there’s something about the softness of the etching lines that gives the image a kind of melancholic feel. I feel the quiet concentration, the turning inward. What Webb and those other painters have in common is that they're all in conversation with each other across time, thinking about the same problems like how to evoke a feeling with a mark. And that's what keeps art alive. It's an exchange, a sharing of ideas, and an openness to the unknown.