The Golden Cornice, I 1904

Joseph Pennell etched “The Golden Cornice, I,” in 1909, using black ink on paper. Look at the hatching and cross-hatching that Pennell used to build up the image. He must have been working from observation, maybe on the street, trying to capture the fleeting light on the buildings of Broadway. I wonder what it was like to be him on that day, translating the overwhelming urban landscape into a series of marks. It's a delicate dance between precision and suggestion, with areas of tight detail dissolving into looser, more atmospheric passages. See how the density of lines creates a sense of depth and scale? The buildings loom, heavy with detail. I think of Piranesi’s architectural fantasies and the way he used line to create a world that is both real and imagined. There's a conversation happening here across time. We’re all in the same boat, trying to make sense of the world through mark-making, aren’t we?