Sky Overcast 1956

Louis Lozowick made 'Sky Overcast' with etching and aquatint, and the effect is pretty spectacular. The sky is doing that thing that skies do - you know, those complex interactions between light, cloud, and atmosphere. It's an exercise in tone, with very few pure whites, and very few pure blacks - it's all grey, grey, grey. Then over this, almost collaged on top, are geometric abstractions that cut through the organic forms of the sky. We could see this as a conversation between abstraction and representation. I wonder if Lozowick wanted to represent the sensation of being in an urban environment, where your view of nature is almost always mediated by architecture. You might be interested to know that he made many lithographs of urban scenes - so in a way this print plays with and extends some of the themes in his wider practice. It makes me think about the relationship between external and internal landscapes and how artists are in an ongoing conversation.