The Theatre, Segesta 1913

Joseph Pennell made this drawing, titled 'The Theatre, Segesta,' with what looks like a graphite pencil. The lightness of the marks makes me think about artmaking as a practice in seeing, an almost meditative process of observing and recording. The texture created by the pencil strokes is so interesting. The shading is built up with these tiny, almost hesitant lines, giving the whole drawing a hazy, dreamlike quality. Look at how the mountains in the background fade into the sky, it’s all just tone and suggestion. Then your eye tracks down to the sharp, angular marks which describe the architecture. There's a real tension between detail and abstraction. It reminds me of some of the landscape drawings of Cy Twombly, although Twombly’s mark making has a much more scribbled, chaotic feel. There's such a delicacy and openness in Pennell’s drawing, it celebrates ambiguity over any fixed idea of how the scene should look.