Road to Kairouan, Tunisia 1970

Ivan Albright made this drawing, Road to Kairouan, Tunisia, with what looks like pen and ink, maybe even colored pencils. Imagine the scratch of the nib across the page, a flurry of marks trying to capture the vastness of the desert. Looking at it, I'm thinking about the sheer effort, the repetitive motion of making each tiny dash. Was he trying to map out every grain of sand, every ripple in the dunes? The overall texture is so vibrant. Did Albright feel the need to document everything he saw? It's a landscape, but not in the traditional sense. The yellow streaks could be the sun, or maybe just an emotional stand-in for the heat. The blues and browns could represent the earth and sky. It’s almost child-like in its simplicity. Albright's work has a dark, almost obsessive quality, yet I see a deep affection for the world in his gesture. It reminds me that artists are always in conversation with one another.