France at Her Furnaces 1917

James McBey made this etching, called France at Her Furnaces, with ink and a metal plate. It's all flickering lines and grainy textures. You can almost feel the heat radiating off the page. I imagine McBey, bent over his plate, scratching away at the metal, trying to capture the intensity of the scene. The thin lines of the etching describe a group of men pulling, maybe forging metal? What’s being made, and what will it be used for? There's something about the way the figures are rendered, all urgency and strain, that reminds me of Käthe Kollwitz, or even Goya. That feeling of bearing witness to something raw and essential about the human condition. The textures create such depth, especially where the ink pools together. It reminds me that art is always in conversation with itself, artists borrowing and building on each other's ideas, each mark a tiny act of translation. And so, the conversation continues!