Captain Sandy 1989

Edwin Austin Abbey drew Captain Sandy with ink on paper, and just look at the marks he makes. It's all about this tight hatching, like he's knitting the image together. You can see the thinking, the 'how' of it, right on the surface. The beauty of a drawing like this is how the material tells the story. The ink is dry, matte, not glossy. Each stroke is considered, building up the shadows on Captain Sandy's face, or the texture of the rocks. See how the lines create this dense, dark patch on the rocks in the foreground? It's like the weight of the image is all piling up there, a real anchor. Abbey's work, with its narrative and literary bent, always makes me think a bit of someone like Edward Hopper, in that both had a deep concern with representing the figure within a psychological landscape, but where Hopper used light and colour to create this, Abbey used the careful articulation of line. It's all part of this ongoing conversation, right? A visual, material way of asking, "How do we see?"