Elevated 1936

Frederick J. Whiteman made this etching, called Elevated, in 1956. Look at these dark, decisive lines scratching away at the surface. It's so graphic, so determined, isn't it? I imagine Whiteman hunched over the plate, incising the image bit by bit, building up this elevated world, scraping lines into the metal, each one a commitment. There’s a whole system of seeing and thinking embedded in this print. I wonder, what was he thinking about when he made this? What did 'elevated' mean to him? It feels like a cityscape, but also something more abstract, like an elevated state of mind. I'm thinking of Klee, maybe Gorky or Kandinsky. In art, everything is in conversation with everything else, right? Whiteman’s print is his way of talking, his way of being part of that big, ongoing conversation of image making. There's something so great about seeing how artists riff off of each other. They make something entirely new by looking at what came before them.