Icarus 1963

John Dowell made this intaglio print, Icarus, using a painstaking approach that almost obscures the figure within the ether. Look how the lines scatter and coalesce, like memories fading in and out of focus. The way the ink sits on the paper, a little gritty, a little worn, reminds me that art isn't about perfection, it's about process, about the journey. The blacks aren't solid, they're built up from layers of marks, like sediment in a riverbed. The whites flicker like stars in a night sky. In the lower center, there's this one little white shape amidst all that darkness, surrounded by dense areas of granular grays, like a tiny beacon of hope or innocence amidst the tragedy. Dowell’s print makes me think about the prints of Jasper Johns and the way he also excavates meaning from the monochrome, embracing the accidental, and finding beauty in the imperfect. Art, after all, is a conversation, a back-and-forth across time and space, where meanings shift and multiply with each new voice.