Montes Apenninus Region of the Moon 1972

Nancy Graves made this map-like drawing of the Montes Apenninus Region of the Moon with pastel and graphite on paper. Imagine Graves, leaning in close, building up the image with thousands of tiny marks. I wonder what she was thinking about as she worked? It makes me think about Agnes Martin and the obsessive hand-drawn grids she made; a kind of mapping of interior space. But here, it is all craters and cosmic dust, translated into a weirdly earthly palette of pink and blue. I find myself getting lost in the accumulation of marks that seem to vibrate on the surface. The scale is strangely ambiguous. Is this the macro view of a lunar landscape or a micro view of some strange new cellular life? Painters are always in dialogue with one another, riffing off ideas from the past, present, and future. Graves’ drawing, for me, opens up a space of not-knowing, embracing uncertainty, and suggesting that there are many possible ways of seeing and mapping the world around us.