The Hall at Cliveden 1912

In this drawing, Joseph Pennell renders a hall with graphite, or something similar. I love the way he gives us the hall, but then almost seems to scribble it out. It makes me think about Cy Twombly, another artist who liked to scratch and write and draw, and how sometimes the gesture of erasure can be just as important as the gesture of creation. It’s like Pennell is saying, "Here is this grand space, but also, here is the energy and the time it takes to perceive it." The pillars are solid but rendered with such speed, and then all that shadow just pooling at the bottom, a dark mass. Maybe Pennell was thinking about light and shadow, maybe about history, maybe about the feeling of a place. It’s all there in those marks, those decisions, those erasures. It’s like he’s handing us his looking, not just a picture. It asks you to spend time with it and to make up your own mind.