Telephone Poles at Krum c. 1935

Coreen Mary Spellman made "Telephone Poles at Krum" using hatching, cross-hatching, and a strong contrast between light and dark. I'm imagining the act of printmaking itself—the way the image emerges through carving, inking, and pressing, like a photographic negative coming to life. What was she thinking when she made this? Maybe she was drawn to the harsh geometries of the industrial landscape, the way telephone poles and train tracks slice through the horizon. The blacks are so solid, dense, and absolute. A single mark on the printing plate builds up to the whole. There's a loneliness, a starkness to it all, like an Edward Hopper painting but in black and white. Think about other artists who were drawn to the American landscape, like Charles Sheeler or the Precisionists. They were all trying to capture something about modernity, the beauty and the alienation of the machine age. Spellman is also doing that, but with a more personal touch, a quieter kind of observation.