Name/Title
Blueberry Barrens | Pauline Winchester Inman | Wood Engraving | 1950Description
Artist: Pauline Inman
Medium: Woodblock engraving
Circa: 1950
Old Accession Number: 1835
Description:
Signed bottom right. 1 of 2 copies.
Blueberry Barrens, 1950
Wood Engraving
Two blueberry rakers, eyes downcast, carry their lunch boxes across the dirt path as they either arrive at dawn to begin their work or head home in the evening after an exhausting workday. Inman’s use of shadows evokes the warm atmosphere of an August day. The sun, low in the horizon and coming from the left side of the composition, throws dramatic columns of shadows attached to the workers’ feet, pricked by the low blueberry bushes; the shadows cast by the clouds in the sky give rolling contours to the barrens. Inman employed contrasting mark making in the tiny leaves of the craggy blueberry bushes and the long streaks of clouds reflecting the sun low in the sky. The resulting distinction between foreground and background, reproduces the expansive feeling of blueberry barrens: open to the elements and seemingly never ending.