Quarry Pool 1936

Arnold Wiltz made "Quarry Pool" in 1936. It's a woodcut, so it's all about the process of carving away, leaving only what you want to print. The composition is structured around a balance of black and white marks. The blacks feel weighty, like massive rocks. The texture is amazing—you can almost feel the rough surface of the stone, the sharp edges. The light, where it peeks through, feels almost like a reprieve. Look at the rock on the left – it's like a study in texture, with all the different lines and angles creating this sense of depth. It reminds me a bit of the graphic work of someone like Max Beckmann, where everything is distilled down to these really essential forms. There's a certain ambiguity here, too. Is this a scene of desolation, or is there a quiet beauty in this stark landscape? Maybe it's both. Art is always asking us to see things in more than one way.