City Park

This print belongs to the period in Dennis's work when he was paying close attention to public spaces in Pacific Northwest cities. The tagging as Urban Scenes and Gardens points to a planted, civic landscape — a downtown square or neighborhood park — rather than wild nature. Woodcut technique is well suited to the simplified vegetation and architectural elements such a subject affords: trees reduce to dark masses, paths and lawns to flat tonal areas, and benches or fences to crisp linear cuts. Dennis's mature practice combined American regionalist subject matter with a graphic vocabulary that drew on European modernist printmaking and on the spatial conventions of Japanese landscape prints. City Park sits in this hybrid territory, where a recognizably American civic space is rendered through a print idiom partly indebted to non-Western sources, the foliage masses functioning much as they do in the kacho-e tradition where flat dark areas of plant matter anchor the composition.