Interior with Bottles 1949

Fannie Hillsmith made this print titled *Interior with Bottles* with graphic marks that push and pull our understanding of spatial depth. I imagine her scraping into the plate, the way the lines vary from thick to thin, the pressure and the drag of the tool, and the acid biting into the metal, all coming together in this dance of control and chance. I feel a deep sympathy with her vision. I imagine her thinking about what it means to represent a bottle, not just as a still life, but as a dynamic presence, a character in a play of light and shadow. The cross-hatching feels like she’s trying to find the weight and volume of the bottles, like she’s building them up from nothing, one tiny line at a time. And the way she uses the negative space, the white areas, to define the shapes, it’s almost like she’s carving the bottles out of thin air. You can see how she looked to cubism and abstraction, but she’s also doing her own thing, and I think it’s important to remember that artists are always in conversation with each other, borrowing, stealing, and transforming ideas in their own way.