House Forms 1926

This is Ralph M. Pearson’s black and white print, called 'House Forms'. Look at the density of marks, their overall directionality, and the contrast between them, which renders the image both solid and fragile. I bet Pearson was thinking about the history of printmaking, but also about the way modernism was turning the world into hard-edged geometric planes. I wonder if he felt that the world was becoming too rational, and whether this etching was an attempt to create something more intuitive. Imagine him scraping away at the metal plate, making all those tiny, almost obsessive marks, trying to capture the essence of these buildings, the sky, the water. It feels as if he’s trying to reduce the houses to their basic shapes, but also to convey a sense of their solidity and permanence. The conversation between artists never ends. Each one is picking up on something someone else left behind and transforming it into something new.