Stone #1 1942

John Opper created "Stone #1" as a black and white print. The artist's hand, I imagine, moved with both force and delicacy, creating a dance of darks and lights. It’s like Opper was wrestling with shapes, trying to pin them down on the page. I see jagged edges, soft washes, and lines darting across the surface, each mark revealing a little bit about his thought process. Look at the way he's built up these layers of tone, like a sculptor carving away at a block of stone. You get a sense of the artist’s struggle to bring order to chaos, to find a sense of balance in the midst of all this frenetic energy. The push and pull between abstraction and figuration, that's what keeps me hooked. It feels like I'm catching a glimpse of the artist's inner world. Painters are always looking at each other, borrowing ideas, having a silent conversation across time. It’s this shared language of mark-making, this endless exploration of form and feeling, that makes painting such a vital and enduring form of expression.