Untitled (Piano c. 1935

Lionel Wendt made this photogravure, called Untitled (Piano), sometime in his short life before 1944. It’s all dreamy sepias and soft blurs, like a memory half-recalled or a song heard from far away. I wonder what Wendt was thinking when he made this? Maybe he was interested in the way objects can haunt each other, how the keys of the piano seem to bleed into the body of… well, what is that? Some kind of machine? The shapes feel like they are constantly emerging and dissolving, a process of layering and obscuring. Photography can be a kind of painting, too. It’s about light and dark, surface and depth, just like a canvas. And like painting, photography can be a form of embodied expression, embracing ambiguity. This piece is definitely less about a fixed interpretation, and more about a feeling, a mood… Ultimately, artists inspire one another. We are all in an ongoing conversation, across time, trying to make sense of the world in our own ways.