The Embarkation Camp, the Classic Grove 1917

Joseph Pennell made this drawing called ‘The Embarkation Camp, the Classic Grove’ with pencil on paper. It is almost as if you can feel the artist hovering, searching, making marks on the paper to make sense of the world. What’s so magical about drawing, or painting, is that it becomes a record of the artist’s looking. I’m thinking about those lines he used to conjure the sky. It feels as if the drawing has come into being through a kind of layering of thought, an accumulation of tiny marks. I wonder if Pennell was thinking about the history of landscape drawing, like, what did he want to take from it? Or add to it? Painters are always in conversation with each other across time, aren’t they? They keep each other company. Each mark made on the paper leaves a record of this exchange.