Crane 1960

Curator: "Crane" by Donald Carlisle Greason, created around 1960. It seems to be a watercolor and ink drawing. Editor: Immediately, there’s a feeling of transience about it. It’s fleeting. The thin washes and skeletal lines feel like capturing something just before it vanishes. Curator: I love that. The skeletal quality feels particularly resonant given that it's, well, a crane! In many ways it can resemble the image of death or a scarecrow in some landscapes. This also reads to me like a symbol of transition or labor… almost as an abandoned figure. Editor: Exactly. A fascinating tension—something that should evoke strength and industry feels frail. Cranes in dreams often point to using your power to improve your circumstances, and there's an eerie emptiness here. What kind of circumstances demanded a crane that felt, visually, so close to collapsing? Curator: Maybe it’s also the artist’s method, because if you get really close to this drawing, you realize the whole thing is basically just a sophisticated set of marks… It barely qualifies as figurative. A sort of abstracted reality perhaps? Editor: The quick, loose lines, yeah. Think about how cranes function, too, always in a state of precarious balance. This makes me think about stability, fragility, even temporality in visual representation. We use signs and shorthand to construct images in our minds...but the reality, here, feels almost haunted, and a ghostly echo of labor, industry, and modernity. Curator: Which, really, maybe gives us a sense of where modernism was going. Maybe it captures a fleeting feeling, on its way out. This may have even just been something done in an idle moment…a capturing of everyday landscape from near Greason’s home perhaps. But those impressions have lasted. Editor: Definitely left its mark, pun intended. A fragile crane, lifting burdens—a poignant image. It makes you consider what all of our technology leaves in its wake, and makes you wonder if we're even aware in the moment. Curator: Beautifully put. I know I’ll see construction equipment differently now, maybe even catch a bit of this frailty in the air.