Tondo 1962

This is James McGarrell’s Tondo, a work that comes into being through an accumulation of hatched marks. Just imagine the artist, McGarrell, making thousands of tiny, repetitive strokes with his pen. What was McGarrell thinking as he built up this delicate, almost ethereal, portrait? The way the marks curve to create the illusion of volume is a neat bit of trickery. You can feel the pressure of the pen as it moves across the paper, sometimes dense and dark, and sometimes so light it almost disappears. I think he was probably looking at Renaissance portraiture when he made this, maybe Leonardo’s drawings, where everything emerges from a similar type of layering. Artists are always having a conversation with each other across time, and here McGarrell is in dialogue with artists from centuries ago. It reminds us that all art builds on what came before, transforming it into something new.