Memorial 1950

Benton Spruance made this print, Memorial, with lithographic ink on paper. Look at the way Spruance layers colour to create depth, like a half-remembered dreamscape. It feels like a process of building up and then scraping back, revealing underlying layers. There’s a beautiful tension here between the flat, graphic quality of the printmaking and the almost sculptural rendering of forms like the skull at the top, or the painted faces that jostle below. The textures have a real tactile presence. The way the yellow ground seeps into the gray cross is so evocative. It’s almost like a memory, where the edges blur and things aren’t quite defined. The way the lithographic ink sits on the paper, it's matte and chalky, pulling you into its surface. The skulls and masks remind me a little of James Ensor, and his fascination with the grotesque. It’s like Spruance is saying, "Here's a collection of images," and invites us to interpret them in our own way. Art is an ongoing conversation, where there is always room for ambiguity.