Spring 1917

This is Spring, a print made by James McBey in 1917 using etching. Look at the economy of the marks, how he evokes a landscape with a network of lines! It’s almost like he's scribbling, but in a really controlled way. You can tell that he really understood the process of printmaking. There’s so much texture in this piece, even though it is mostly monochrome. I keep coming back to the foreground, to the way the artist describes the grassy area. You can see the individual strokes, and there’s something almost tactile about it, like you could reach out and feel the roughness of the ground. Maybe the thinness of the lines is supposed to speak to the fragility of new life, or the endurance of nature, or something. Anyway, the way McBey uses line reminds me a bit of some of Giacometti's drawings. They share a similar kind of nervous energy and a feeling of searching. Art's always building off of other art, right? It's never really about answers, more about questions.