San Gimignano 1909

Donald Shaw MacLaughlan made this print of San Gimignano with etching, a process of scratching lines into a metal plate, inking it, and pressing it onto paper. I like to think about how the artist might have felt while making the artwork. What was it like for MacLaughlan to stand in that very spot, looking out over the Italian countryside? There’s a tension here, the scene feels both intimate and epic. See those towers in the distance? They rise up, drawn with so much care, like exclamation points in the landscape. It's as if MacLaughlan is thinking about the passage of time and the weight of history, capturing a moment that’s both fleeting and eternal. MacLaughlan is in conversation with the Old Masters, like Rembrandt and Dürer, but he’s also doing his own thing. He's teaching us to see the world in a new way.