Oracle Mountains, Arizona 1957

Leo Meissner made "Oracle Mountains, Arizona" as a drawing, and what strikes me first is how immediate and intuitive the process feels. The drawing has a real clarity to it, but there’s also a textural depth, especially in the handling of the rocks. The artist allows the pencil to skip and stutter across the surface, creating a sense of volume and weight without ever resorting to heavy-handed shading. It’s fascinating how much information is conveyed through a combination of line and tone. The rough, unfinished quality gives the work an honesty. This piece reminds me a bit of Cezanne, in the way that both artists are trying to grasp the underlying structure of the landscape. But where Cezanne builds up his forms through layers of color, Meissner strips things back to the bare essentials of line and tone. Both artists embrace ambiguity and the impossibility of capturing nature perfectly.