Tropical Bay [verso] 1936

William Vaughn Cash sketched this scene of a Tropical Bay, probably on site, with a pencil on a creamy-colored piece of paper. It looks like a landscape, but the sketch is so minimal, it also verges on the abstract. I like to think about what the artist might have been thinking when they made it. Maybe Cash was trying to capture the bare essence of the scene, the basic shapes and forms that make up the landscape. The marks are very light, almost tentative, as if he was feeling his way around the subject. It’s all about potential. I wonder if he was thinking about other artists who have depicted similar scenes. There's something timeless about it, this desire to capture a sense of place. It reminds me that artists are always in conversation with each other, across time and space, riffing on the same themes and ideas. And for me, painting is like that, too—an ongoing dialogue with the past, present, and future.