Sunday

Sunday is a mood-driven title rather than a descriptive one, and prints by Dennis under such headings typically depict the quiet, half-empty streets, idle vehicles, and shuttered storefronts of a Northwest town on a day off. The subject suits the woodcut medium: a few large architectural masses, a strip of sidewalk, perhaps a parked car or a lone figure, all reduced to broad relief-cut shapes that read clearly from a distance. Dennis's compositions of this kind often place a horizontal band of buildings across the middle of the sheet, with the foreground street and the upper sky treated as nearly empty fields, an economy of design indebted both to American Regionalist prints and to the spatial restraint of Japanese landscape woodblocks. The 1986 prints sit at a confident point in his career, when his graphic vocabulary for the small-town vernacular had fully stabilized and he was producing some of the most assured townscape work of his career.