Tevia Praying 1957 - 1961

Anatoli Kaplan made this lithograph, Tevia Praying, working with a black stone to create a deeply textured image. The way Kaplan builds up the image through layers of marks, it's like he’s not just depicting a scene but building a whole world. I love the wall behind Tevia, it’s not just a wall, it's a field of tiny black marks, alive with energy. It’s like the texture itself is a kind of prayer, a visual hum resonating through the whole scene. And Tevia himself, slumped on the chair, seems almost swallowed by the density of the print. You can see this mark making echoed in the work of someone like Nancy Spero, who similarly used simple marks to create complex surfaces, a sense of layering and accumulation that speaks to the power of process and the beauty of letting things build up over time. Art is all about conversations across time and space, after all.