Melon Day 1937

Don Emil Glasell made this black and white etching, Melon Day, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. Looking closely, you can see how the image is built up from layers of tiny hatched lines. It feels like he's slowly building the scene through a process of incremental, repeated gestures. The texture of this print is fascinating; the lines are so close together in places that they create solid forms, like the dark, looming figure in the lower left, or the knot of people clustered around him. The surface is a little rough, which gives the image a kind of gritty, documentary feel. I'm drawn to the way the lines describe the faces in the crowd, all these different expressions, from curiosity to boredom to outright suspicion. It reminds me a little of some of the social realist prints made during the WPA era, that same sense of everyday life captured with a kind of unsentimental honesty. Ultimately, it's Glasell’s embrace of these ambiguities, these multiple perspectives, that keeps me coming back to this quietly captivating image.