Insomnia c. 1960

Caroline Wogan Durieux made this print, *Insomnia*, and you can see the graveyard stretching out, under a sky full of pinpoint stars. I can imagine Durieux, late at night, mixing her inks, layering dark over darker, trying to capture that feeling of being wide awake when the world is asleep. The skeleton sprawled among the crosses is kind of humorous, a little bit defiant. It reminds me of those medieval woodcuts, where Death is always hanging around, making trouble. There's a bravery in her work, a willingness to look at the uncomfortable stuff. I can imagine her in the studio, wrestling with the image, adding and subtracting, until it finally clicked. The skeleton looks a bit like it is also wrestling around, sleepless too. It’s a reminder that artists are in an ongoing conversation, riffing off each other across time and space. It invites us to find our own meanings in the image.