Great College Street, Westminster 1904

Joseph Pennell made this print of Great College Street in Westminster using a process of etching, probably with acid on a metal plate. What’s neat about etching is that it's all about the line - that laborious, repetitive, yet also deeply intuitive process. Pennell makes marks that are almost like scribbles, a kind of shorthand. There's a looseness that gives the image a sense of immediacy, as though he were capturing the scene on the fly. Look at the way he renders the foliage, it's almost like a tangle of threads. The contrast between the solid, architectural forms and the more ephemeral, organic elements is really striking. You can sense a dialogue between man-made structures and the unruly force of nature, that feels alive and in process. Think of Piranesi, another printmaker, but from a different time and place, also obsessed with architecture. Both artists use the graphic medium to construct worlds that feel both real and imagined, solid and yet transient. Art is an ongoing conversation, a back-and-forth across time, where ideas get reinterpreted, subverted, and expanded.