Outward Bound 1918

Philip Little made this etching, titled "Outward Bound", sometime around 1898. Look at all those lines, like scratches on a mirror, that come together to build the ships, the water, the sky. It’s like he's thinking through the image, finding it as he goes. The texture of the print is so immediate, you can almost feel the metal plate under your fingers. See how the light catches the water, broken up into these tiny, flickering marks? And then, over to the left, that big dark mass of the dockyard, built up with so many cross-hatched lines that it becomes almost solid. It's a great lesson in how something can be both a picture and a physical object at the same time. Little makes me think of Whistler, especially in the way he captures a particular time of day, and a certain mood. I love that art is always this conversation between artists, across time and space, each one building on what came before, but always finding their own way.