Dominion 1920

Arthur Bowen Davies made "Dominion" using lithography. Look closely, and you'll notice it's all about the marks – light, feathery lines that build up these ethereal figures. It’s like Davies is thinking out loud, letting us see the process of creation itself. There's a real physicality to the piece. The lithographic crayon gives it a grainy, almost velvety texture, especially in the darker areas where he's built up the tone. The way the figures emerge from the shadows, they are at once present and dissolving. Notice the standing figure, see how Davies uses these confident, decisive marks to define his musculature, then contrasts it with the more fleeting, ghostlike rendering of the figures beside him. It’s this dance between clarity and ambiguity that really grabs me. Davies’s work reminds me a bit of Odilon Redon's dreamlike imagery, this sense of floating in a world that's both beautiful and just a little bit unsettling. Art's not about having all the answers. It's about creating a space for questions, for possibilities, for the stuff that's always just out of reach.