View I 1998

This print, "View I," by Ruth Fine, is made up of tangled, nervous marks of black ink. It's a tree, but not really a tree. I imagine her bent over the plate, pushing and pulling the ink, wiping it away, trying to find the thing she's after. Look how the lines swarm and pool. A big dark blob dominates the composition. It’s so interesting how she finds clarity through such a confusing, multi-layered process. The artist must have been thinking about landscape, about the way things grow and the chaos of the natural world. It reminds me a little of Guston, who was also obsessed with finding a way to represent the world through simple forms and heavy lines. All artists are in conversation, you know? Taking from each other, pushing each other to new places. And like Guston, Fine isn't afraid to embrace ambiguity, to leave things unresolved. It’s almost as if it's a feeling, a memory of a tree.