East Blatchington 1908

Muirhead Bone made this etching, East Blatchington, and I love the way he makes the lines do so much work. It's all about process, isn’t it? How much can you get out of a single mark? The sepia tone of the ink gives a warmth that contrasts with the stark, scratchy lines. Look at the thatch roof on the left. It’s a dense, almost chaotic scribble up close, but it reads so clearly as texture and form from a distance. That sort of tension between abstraction and representation is what gets me going. And then there’s the blank space, the untouched paper that becomes the sky and the open field. It reminds me a bit of Whistler's etchings, that same kind of delicate touch. I think the magic of art is how it makes us see the world anew. It’s not about perfection, but about embracing the messy, the imperfect, the ambiguous.