Cincinnati Terminal c. 1930

Louis Conrad Rosenberg made this etching titled 'Cincinnati Terminal,' and honestly, it's the mark-making that grabs me first. It’s so open and airy, yet incredibly descriptive. Look at the varied line weights – scratchy, confident, and delicate all at once. It’s like he’s thinking aloud, the image growing organically from a web of intentions and hesitations. The texture is all in the density and direction of these lines, building depth and atmosphere with what is essentially just a collection of scratches on a surface. Notice how the foreground buildings are rendered with denser, more defined lines, whereas the background dissolves into a haze of lighter strokes. It’s a beautiful way of capturing space and distance, not through meticulous detail, but through the suggestive power of the mark. It reminds me a little of Piranesi's architectural fantasies, in that both artists suggest an almost impossible sense of scale through the obsessive accumulation of linear details. Ultimately, art is about possibility, not about fixed realities.