Houses at a Street Corner c. 1930

Abraham Walkowitz made this drawing, *Houses at a Street Corner*, with graphite on paper. Look at the way the marks accumulate. It is like he is building up the image bit by bit, one little stroke at a time, building a world. I love the texture of it, how the graphite sits on the surface, grainy and almost shimmering in the light. He really coaxes a range of tones from the simple grey, from almost white in the sides of the houses to the deepest darks in the road, and the telephone poles. See that scribble in the sky, that’s where I start, I want to scrape away that bit of nothing. Walkowitz reminds me of Marsden Hartley, in the way he found a way of doing things simply, and just kept at it, obsessively working and reworking the same ideas over and over, and, as with Hartley, I suspect that with Walkowitz, it was all about the process, a way of thinking through drawing.