Visitor's Day c. 1935 - 1943

David Feinstein made this print, called "Visitor's Day," probably in the 1930s or 40s. It’s all in shades of gray, and the marks are so clearly carved, you can almost feel the artist's hand moving through the material. You can imagine Feinstein thinking about how to balance all these dark and light areas, pushing and pulling the image into focus. I wonder what it was like for him, standing there with his tools, deciding which parts to cut away and which to leave. There's a real sense of care in the way he’s rendered each face and figure. The texture and the stark contrasts really bring out a sense of place and time. The image shows people in a row, and people watching. The children are beautifully realized. All those children sitting in their little chairs! The viewer feels implicated in the scene. I’m reminded of other artists who used printmaking to capture the everyday, like Jacob Lawrence. Feinstein, like them, uses the medium to tell a story, to document a moment in time. It's like he’s saying, “Look, this happened, these people existed.” And in that act of looking, we’re connected, across time and space, to his vision.