Traffic

Traffic almost certainly takes as its subject a multi-vehicle street scene rather than a single isolated automobile, distinguishing it from the related single-vehicle portraits Dennis cut the same year. The print likely shows a row or cluster of cars and possibly buses or trucks, compressed into the compact rectangular field typical of his urban work, with the picture plane often tipped forward so that several vehicles read simultaneously across the sheet. Dennis built such compositions through interlocking color blocks and bold contour, with the woodgrain of the plank often left as visible texture in roadway and sky. As one of three transportation prints from 1986 — alongside Trolley Bus and Town Sedan — Traffic shows him working through the genre by accumulation: he returned to the same family of mechanical subjects across a single year, varying scale, viewpoint, and density of incident, in keeping with the sustained serial habits of his printmaking practice.