Oil Man's Christmas Tree 1941

Alexandre Hogue made this print, Oil Man's Christmas Tree, in 1941, and what gets me is its obsessive mark-making, the way the forms are built up out of tiny, almost frantic, hatched lines. It's like Hogue is trying to capture every detail, every little nuance of light and shadow, and in doing so, he reveals the deep strangeness of the scene. There's a gritty texture to everything, from the sharp metal edges of the oil well to the dense foliage behind it. You can almost feel the roughness of the metal, the weight of those gigantic wheels. The longer I look, the more I realize how the light reflects. There's something unsettling about this image: the way the natural and the industrial collide, the ominous presence of the oil derricks in the background. Like Marsden Hartley or Charles Burchfield, Hogue creates his own way of seeing the world through an intensely personal vision. It reminds me that art can hold onto ambiguity and multiple interpretations, offering us space for our own reflections.