Black against white

This is nothing to do with people in American politics but was the title of the other art exhibition I explored (upstairs) at the Carleton University Art Gallery, back in October. (My penultimate blogpost described the exhibition downstairs.)

John J. A. Murphy, who lived from 1888 to 1967, specialised in wood engravings, though his career began as a designer of camouflage uniforms for the U.S. infantry in the First World War. When he went on to do his black and white cubist pieces in the 1920s, of Wrestlers, for example, and Sprinters, the effect was still of camouflage, so that you have to concentrate quite hard to decipher which parts of the picture are which when looking at these engravings. I was reminded of M C Escher's art from the same period. In Murphy's engraving Shadow-boxing, the figures' muscles are done by hatching, so as to keep things linear; he was influenced by his contemporary, Eric Gill, apparently, and like him did obsessive series of religious prints, a row of miniscule Stations of the Cross for instance, in 1921. Three years later, when Murphy's son was born, he took it upon himself to produce a hundred Nativity prints, but only managed to complete 28 of them. A thought apposite to his work had been written down by the poet John Gould Fletcher that same year:

Something is subtracted from darkness by every beam of light; yet darkness remains.