Untitled (Foundry) 1946 - 1947

Leonard Pytlak made this print called Foundry using lithography – you can see the soft blending where he worked the stone. I can imagine him thinking, "How do I convey this place? What do I focus on?" The answer is not to describe everything, but to dive into the feeling of being in a place. Pytlak has used the darkness to surround the furnace, which glows with the yellow and red of burning metal. What’s so interesting is that it’s not that the painting is dark so much as it is that the light emerges out of a heavy darkness. He then adds people, like witnesses to something immense and powerful. Painters have always looked at each other's work and thought, "I want to try that." Or, "I want to do that differently!" Foundry is a great example of how artists inspire each other across time. You can almost see him looking at other artists and saying, "Yeah, I can do that," and then making it his own. And that’s how we keep art alive: by talking to each other through our paintings.