Francais inconnus 1917

James McBey created this etching, a bleak military gravesite, with a dark sepia ink scraped and scratched from the plate. I can almost feel the artist's hand as he draws, each line deliberate, building up this somber scene. Look at the way McBey uses these tiny marks, like whispers, to suggest the enormity of loss. You can see he has clustered the crosses in a kind of dance of death. This isn’t just a landscape; it’s a landscape of mourning. It's really powerful. What was McBey thinking as he made this? I think the material aspects of etching—the scraping, the biting, the inking—really amplified the emotions. It's so sad, and the process itself seems like a form of memorializing. I keep coming back to that, how an artist makes marks, and how those marks can communicate feeling.