Liberty 1930

Ellison Hoover made this print called Liberty, we don't know exactly when, but there's something about the dark velvety way he's rendered the scene that feels like a bygone era. I'm always fascinated by how artists handle light, and here, Hoover’s use of stippling is really effective, like tiny stars concentrated around the torch. You can almost feel the mist in the air. Maybe he was thinking about the way light refracts in a dark, wet city, all those little pinpricks against the night. Looking at this, I’m reminded of other artists who've taken on iconic monuments, like Charles Demuth who created a series of paintings of American industrial structures. There's a quiet beauty in Hoover's Statue of Liberty, a monument to something, that feels so heavy. Like a secret. Each artist brings their own perspective, and it’s in this exchange that art evolves, pushing the boundaries of how we see and feel.