American Pioneers c. 1935

Conrad Buff's "American Pioneers" is a work of art made with what looks like graphite on paper, though who knows, maybe it's ink, or charcoal. It’s about the process of discovery. Look at the surface; Buff creates depth with a combination of dense, dark marks and areas of open, light space. There is a lot of visual information, but you can feel the weight of the artist’s hand as he worked over the paper to create this scene. I think the drawing is so fascinating, because it's made up of a lot of tiny marks. There’s a lot of different kinds of pressure. Like, how he used the weight of his hand to create a really dark, brooding shadow on the left. It reminds me a little of Agnes Martin, actually, but instead of the grid, here, it’s a bunch of short little lines that seem to make up the landscape, as if the landscape is made up of a million different marks and gestures. That's how the world is, right?