The Shell Factory 1916

Joseph Pennell made 'The Shell Factory' with what looks like graphite or charcoal on paper. The drawing feels immediate. He's unafraid to leave lines exposed, letting us in on the mechanics of its making. There is a real push and pull between detail and omission in the factory scene. Pennell seems to relish in the depiction of the machinery and figures in the foreground. Then, the figures towards the back are more spectral, like ghosts in the machine. My eye is drawn to those tubes, the shells themselves, lined up like a chorus line, ready to be sent off to some unknown, deadly performance. It reminds me of the stark industrial landscapes evoked by Charles Sheeler and the precisionist painters, though Pennell's mark-making feels a little less exact and more expressionistic. Art is always this conversation, isn't it? A constant dialogue across time and space. Like this factory, art is a place of labor, where meaning is manufactured, not found.