Untitled (Along the Erie Canal)

William J. Scott made this untitled print of the Erie Canal sometime in the early twentieth century. What strikes me is the way he’s built up these tonal areas with tiny little hatched marks. It’s a reminder that even what looks like a flat surface is actually made up of a zillion different decisions. Take the big hill in the background: it’s soft and rounded but also scratchy and alive, because you can see every little mark that makes it up. It’s a humble kind of mark-making, not trying to be too fancy, but somehow, the accumulation of all those tiny strokes adds up to something really powerful. It reminds me a bit of the early work of Philip Guston, before he went totally abstract. Both artists share that same kind of dedicated, process-oriented approach to artmaking.