Southwest Foothills 1949

Dorothy Westaby McCray made this lithograph of the Southwest Foothills, pulling the image from a stone onto paper. It's like the whole landscape is breathing, you know? Look at the way the light and dark create these rolling hills. It's not just about what you see, but how you feel when you're in a place. I love how the lithographic crayon is used to create a grainy texture like the land itself is made of tiny dots. It's like she's building the world mark by mark, and the moon glows with a soft diffused halo. I see echoes of early 20th century American modernists like Marsden Hartley in McCray's work. What's really cool is how she uses these marks to create a sense of depth and distance. It shows how art is always a conversation between artists, across time and space, each one adding their own voice to the mix. Ultimately, it’s the openness, the ambiguity, that makes art so powerful.