Battle Wagon - U.S.S. Alabama 1943

John Taylor Arms made this etching, Battle Wagon - U.S.S. Alabama, with a focus on capturing the sheer scale of the warship, using line to describe all those complex forms. It’s a dance of marks, all those tiny hatch marks creating tone, depth and form. You can see the etched line in the texture of the ship's hull, where the camouflage pattern is built up from thousands of tiny strokes, and this really emphasizes the physicality of the ship, its presence as a solid, imposing object. The heavy guns pointing skyward are particularly powerful, and there's this crazy dance between precision and chaos. It's not exactly photorealism, and yet not quite abstract, sitting somewhere in between. Like, think about Piranesi, or some of those other masters of architectural etching, with their obsessive attention to detail and epic scale. Ultimately, it’s this tension between the objective and the subjective that makes it so compelling.