The Sunny Corner 1957

Stow Wengenroth made this scene with lithographic crayon on stone, and it feels like a real feat of visual memory. The composition is like a stage set. We see an old house and a fence, then a road disappearing into the distance, framed by a tunnel of trees. The technique here is so labor-intensive. Look closely and you can see it’s all made from tiny, almost microscopic marks of the crayon. Each tiny mark builds up to make textures that suggest the light filtering through the leaves, and the shadows falling on the house and road. It reminds me of Seurat with his pointillist paintings, but in grayscale. This piece really highlights how much the material qualities of a work impact our experience of it. Wengenroth gives us a romantic view of nature, and it reminds us that art is always a conversation across generations.