Goldfish 1931

Grace Albee made this black and white wood engraving called Goldfish, and I can just imagine her patiently carving into that block of wood. There's this push and pull in her work between realistic representation and something more stylized, like how she creates an entire underwater world using line. The three goldfish are swimming around, and it's kind of a whoosh of water and weeds all around them. Look how the scales of the fish are formed by delicate hatched marks, and then contrast that with the bold, graphic lines of the water rippling above. It’s a dance between precision and abstraction, wouldn’t you say? I think about other artists who also loved working in black and white, like Ad Reinhardt. Albee probably looked at their work too, and thought about how to make her own mark. It makes me consider how we all keep talking to each other across time. Each mark is a kind of conversation, an exchange of ideas.