Rooftops 1990

Frederick Mershimer made this print called "Rooftops" using a painstaking technique, to give it that moody, atmospheric feel. You can almost feel Mershimer up there, perched on some rooftop, squinting against the sun, trying to capture the immensity of the sky and the sprawl of the city. Imagine him, his hand moving with a kind of intense focus, etching tiny lines into the plate, building up those clouds bit by bit, shadow by shadow. The way he’s handled the light, it's just fantastic. It reminds me of Piranesi or some of those old masters, but with a modern twist. It’s like he’s saying, "Yeah, I see all this history, but I'm making something new out of it, something that speaks to today." And that antenna, sticking up in the foreground, that's just the perfect touch of now. It's a reminder that art's always in conversation with itself, each artist building on what came before.