Cleavage 1940

Carroll Cloar made this lithograph, titled "Cleavage," sometime in the mid-20th century, with an approach to mark-making that feels both meticulous and dreamlike, which to me is the essence of the artistic process. Look at the surface, the soft gradations of gray achieved through lithography. The texture is almost velvety, creating a visual harmony that invites you closer, even though the scene itself has a strange, unsettling quality. Take a moment to focus on the figure of the boy, he's caught mid-stride, arm outstretched, his image is suspended between the real and the imagined, the memory and the present. It’s this embrace of ambiguity, this dance between clarity and obscurity, that makes Cloar's work so compelling. Cloar reminds me of artists like Marsden Hartley, who also mined personal history for universal truths. Like Hartley, Cloar’s work exists as an ongoing exploration of the self, and the world, through the lens of memory and imagination.