From the Tops of the Furnaces 1916

Joseph Pennell made this drawing, From the Tops of the Furnaces, using what looks like graphite, and possibly some ink. The mark making is incredible. There’s all this cross-hatching, and the whole scene is filled with smoke and industry, drawn with the kind of detail that just comes from looking, and looking, and looking. The piece is, well, gray. It's a symphony of gray, and the grays deepen in the foreground to a nearly solid black. The drawing is all about texture. You can almost feel the grit and the grime just by looking at it. I’m drawn to the figures near the bottom of the image, these tiny people and animals milling about beneath the furnaces. It's like they’re being dwarfed by the scale of industry. I see some echoes of Piranesi in here, who did these incredible architectural prints of prisons. Both are rendering scale and perspective with a kind of obsessive mark making. Artmaking is a conversation, a kind of infinite call and response. Each artist picks up the thread from someone who came before.