Figures walking among old ruins 1998

Edwin Austin Abbey made this drawing with graphite on paper. Look at the way he's built up the image with such delicate lines – it’s as if the scene is emerging from a mist, finding form through a network of subtle marks and erasures. I can almost feel Abbey standing there, squinting in the sunlight, trying to capture the scene before him. Perhaps he was thinking about time, and decay, about how structures and civilizations rise and fall? The figures are dwarfed by the architecture, so this is what comes to my mind. Notice those wandering, searching lines. To me, the texture of the paper shows through – it's almost as if the ground is breathing, as if the ruins themselves are sighing with stories of the past. He reminds me of Poussin or Claude, but with a looseness they would have considered heretical. Artists, you know, we are all just copying each other anyway. In a good way.