Abstract Street Scene 1922

Willard Ayer Nash made this Abstract Street Scene with ink, sometime between 1930 and 1940, and I love the way he's gone about it! The marks aren’t precious, they aren’t labored over – they’re direct and uninhibited. It's like Nash wasn't trying to capture the street so much as evoke the feeling of being on it. The textures in this piece are created by these dense, almost brutal, marks of ink. The contrast between the deep blacks and the bare paper gives it a real sense of depth and shadow. Look at the lower part of the drawing. See how the vertical lines almost vibrate, like a blurry reflection? This to me speaks to the transience of the urban environment, things constantly in flux. Nash reminds me of someone like Lyonel Feininger, another artist who used architectural motifs as a jumping-off point for abstraction, but with a slightly different flavour. Nash invites us to embrace the beauty of imperfection and the joy of pure mark-making. It's a reminder that art doesn't always have to be about precision, but can also be about feeling and intuition.