In the Tropics 1928

Arthur Briscoe made this etching, titled "In the Tropics", using dark brown ink on paper. Briscoe’s all about line, line, line! Look at how he’s scratched into the plate to create a whole world out of simple marks. The rigging’s a web of diagonals, cutting across the sails that billow in the wind. The sea, it's just a mass of horizontal scribbles. There’s this one spot, right where the mast meets the deck, where the lines get so dense they almost turn into a solid shape, like a dark knot holding everything together. It’s a messy kind of mark-making, immediate and direct, nothing polished here. You know, this reminds me a little of Frank Auerbach, the way he builds form out of tangled lines, a kind of relentless energy. It's like both artists are trying to capture something that’s always moving, always changing.