sketches

Day three hundred and five: Still looking at the same etching by Dürer, this peculiar, melancholy face appears near the upper right of the picture. What I am really fascinated by, however, is the tiny landscape Dürer scratched into farthest reaches of the corner. While it is not unusual to see a distant hill or cliff made from the barest of tiny lines in one of his engravings, I’ve never noticed one so geometric and hastily sketched. These two elements — the face and the landscape — are not next to each other in the actual print, but I set them together here as a study. I like the way the man appears to look at the landscape in my version, seemingly studying it much like I have been.