Man in a Rocking Chair c. 1908

Marsden Hartley made this drawing, ‘Man in a Rocking Chair,’ with what looks like graphite on paper. The marks are fast, flickering, like the artist is trying to capture a fleeting image. For me, that’s what art making is: a process of trying to catch something that’s always moving. Look at the way Hartley uses the graphite; it’s almost like he’s sketching the air around the figure, not just the figure itself. The texture feels raw, immediate. You can almost see his hand moving across the page, making lines to build form and volume. Check out the scribbled lines around the man’s head, like a halo of thought, or the way the chair seems to dissolve into the background. It’s less about the subject and more about the sensation of seeing. This reminds me a bit of some of Giacometti’s drawings – that sense of a figure emerging from a haze of marks. Both artists show us how drawing can be a way of thinking through form, rather than just depicting it. In both cases, ambiguity is embraced over fixed meanings.