Coney Island: Winter 1942

Bernard Rosenquit made this print, Coney Island: Winter, and it’s a world of hatched lines, a kind of onomatopoeia for winter, maybe? I can almost imagine Rosenquit with his tools, carefully carving away at the block. He has this Ferris wheel looming up there, kind of dizzying. I can feel the chill of the off-season, the skeletal structures of summer amusements exposed against a gray sky. It has a lonely feeling, doesn't it? Like a stage set after the play is over. And I am thinking that each line, each cut, is a decision, a tiny act of construction, of a feeling. That lattice work that makes up the bulk of the image, it reminds me of Mondrian, but also of the vulnerability of things. And it’s funny, because the heavy black ink, it is so assertive, yet the image it creates is so fragile. It is the artist's hand we are seeing, his memory, filtered through the act of making.