Mission San Luis Obispo 1883

Curator: Today, we are looking at Henry Chapman Ford’s 1883 print, "Mission San Luis Obispo." The artwork depicts the California Mission set against the backdrop of the rolling hills. Editor: Ah, a monochrome memory! It feels so…distant. A wistful glimpse into a slower-paced California. Like a half-remembered dream sketched in delicate lines. Curator: Indeed. What strikes me is Ford’s choice of printmaking. It speaks to the mass dissemination of such images. Consider it: here's a mechanism for spreading visions of the romanticized past, fueling the California mission revival style that would flourish in architecture and popular imagination. Editor: I love that, and yet it feels so raw, that the delicate, scratching, intimate feel you get from pencil work translated into these multiplied visions seems like its trying to remind me about how art history touches culture. A whispered secret among the masses, maybe? I keep coming back to the figures gathered on the porch -- they are a human heartbeat amidst the stone. Curator: And don’t overlook the labor itself. The plates that had to be carved to produce this. Think about the artist repeating a singular action with tools crafted by other workers. Its this labor, repeated endlessly that allowed a new vision of the Californian Mission style. Ford would repeat it endlessly and with his success it in effect re branded california Editor: So the materials, the etching tools, the paper it's all an orchestra playing into Ford's artistic practice. Curator: Absolutely. Its not just the visual representation, but all those people whose contribution it takes to mass produce a single plate work and then disseminate it through multiple forms Editor: Beautiful, yet makes you stop to reflect how there’s such tenderness captured in the medium…the light catching those tiny figures just so… almost makes you wanna pull up a chair. Curator: Well, perhaps that's what Ford intended, for us to remember, reinterpret, and pull up our own chairs. Editor: To the enduring whispers of history…a mission accomplished indeed.