Trolley Bus

A trolley bus, with its distinctive overhead poles connecting to electric wires, was a familiar sight in Seattle through the late twentieth century, and Dennis would have known these vehicles intimately from his Pacific Northwest base. The print likely shows the elongated form of a trackless trolley moving through or stopped along an urban street, rendered through the blocky, planar shapes that characterize his woodcut work. Dennis typically built his images from broadly cut areas of flat color separated by the strong contour lines that survive when waste wood is cleared from a relief block. As a 1986 print from his transportation subjects, Trolley Bus belongs to a sustained body of work in which Dennis took ordinary mechanical fixtures of the modern American street and treated them with the same seriousness Hokusai had given carriages or Hiroshige had given travellers along the Tokaido — a deliberate alignment of contemporary North American observation with the meisho-e tradition of recording the everyday machinery of place.