Untitled c. 1930

This untitled work by Willard Ayer Nash is an ink drawing on paper, full of frantic energy, right? I can really feel the artist's hand moving quickly, trying to capture something fleeting. It's like Nash was wrestling with the image, maybe unsure of exactly what he wanted to express, but driven by a raw, intuitive force. There’s a real material presence here. The marks are so varied – some are short and staccato, others are long and sweeping. Look at the way the lines intersect and overlap, creating a sense of depth and movement. I wonder if Nash was thinking about the cubists? About how to create an image from multiple perspectives? I can feel the tension between representation and abstraction here. I can imagine him, furiously at work, building up the image layer by layer, line by line. These marks are more than just lines, they're traces of the artist's process, their thoughts, and their struggles. And that's what makes it so compelling. Artists are always riffing on each other, like a big conversation. It's inspiring to see how they push each other to see the world in new ways.