Brooklyn Bridge—On the Bridge, No. 1 1944

This is Brooklyn Bridge—On the Bridge, No. 1, made in 1944 by John Marin. Look at the etching, how the barest of lines conjures such a sense of place, of New York City in motion. It's all process, really. The starkness of the printmaking medium—the way the metal plate bites into the paper—gives the image a raw, unfinished quality. It’s like a sketch, capturing the fleeting energy of the bridge. See the angled lines of the bridge's architecture cutting through the composition, creating a kind of controlled chaos? It mirrors the city itself. Marin doesn’t give us a perfect picture. He offers instead a feeling. Arthur Dove, another artist who played with abstraction, comes to mind. Both artists embraced the unpredictable, finding poetry in the everyday. And that’s what art’s about, isn’t it? An ongoing conversation, a dance between intention and accident, and so many different voices.