Elkins Park 1967

Fred Cain made this print, Elkins Park, and the thing I notice right away is the incredible mark making that’s gone into its production. It’s all about the process, really. Look at the bottom left, how the lines are densely packed, creating a kind of textured mass. The gray and off-white areas are interlocked, but the lines are always in charge. These lines work like units of energy, coming together to form objects but always remaining visible as individual gestures. It’s like the ghost of a landscape, or the memory of a place. Cain is showing us the building blocks of seeing, reminding us that an image is made of many individual acts of perception. It calls to mind the abstract landscapes of someone like Forrest Bess, who was also interested in art as a kind of mystical process. Art’s about seeing and feeling, not just knowing.