Sunlight and Shadows, No. 3 1913

"Sunlight and Shadows, No. 3" was made with a needle and acid, probably in some European city, by Donald Shaw MacLaughlan. Imagine him, biting his lip, scraping away at the plate, building up the image from almost nothing. You can see the layers, can't you? The lightest lights barely touched, the darks built up with a million tiny, worried scratches. There's the city in the distance, a shimmer of possibility, but the real focus is on the trees, these upright citizens, soaking up the sun. The longer you look, the more you realize it’s about the balance. That push and pull between light and dark, between detail and suggestion. MacLaughlan is part of a long lineage of printmakers, each riffing off the last, trying to capture the world in a web of lines. Like a drawing, it’s as much about what’s left out as what’s included. That’s where the magic happens, in the space between things.