Ghost Of Sergeant Pelly 1918

George Bellows conjured this haunting scene of war, maybe in charcoal and ink, with lots of rubbing and smudging, sometime before 1925. I can imagine Bellows' hand moving across the paper, feeling the pressure and resistance, trying to get this balance between form and dissolving. It's a tough scene, right? Bodies piled up, violence, despair, and yet, it's rendered with such expressive marks! It's almost like he's wrestling with the subject matter, trying to make sense of it through the act of drawing. The overall feeling is somber and chaotic, but look at the central figures. They're locked in this intense struggle, their forms emerging from the darkness with these furious marks. It’s like he’s trying to grasp something intangible, a ghost of the past maybe. There's a rawness, an immediacy to it, that reminds me of Käthe Kollwitz’s prints. It's a conversation across time, between artists grappling with the human condition. It shows how the process of making—the pushing and pulling, the layering and erasing—can be a way of thinking, of feeling, of trying to understand the world, even when it's messy and uncertain.