Salisbury Plains 1929

Kerr Eby made this print, Salisbury Plains, using a pretty spare, almost monochromatic palette. It’s all about mark-making as a process, a kind of visual thinking-through. Look at the way Eby used line, the sheer physicality of the medium, to conjure this landscape. The texture, right? It’s all in these little, tiny hatch marks. See how he uses them to build up the sky, the fields, even that tiny structure on the lower right? They're like whispers, building up to a story. Each one seems tentative, searching, but together they give you a whole world. It’s like he’s mapping out the atmosphere itself. You know, it reminds me a bit of Whistler, that same kind of delicate touch. But where Whistler is all about atmosphere, Eby feels like he’s after something more grounded. It's a reminder that art is an ongoing conversation, across time and between artists, with no one right answer, just different ways of seeing.