Two Cars

Two Cars sits within Dennis's ongoing inventory of vehicles, signs, and small-town infrastructure that he depicted throughout the mid-1980s. Paired-object compositions of this kind — two boats, two trucks, two cars — recur in his work and lend themselves to the formal logic of the woodcut: large, simplified silhouettes balanced against each other on a shallow ground, with empty street or pavement carrying the eye between them. The print would have been cut on a softwood block, most likely pine, with the contour of each car established through long, deliberate gouge cuts and the surface of the bodywork left as broad inked planes broken only by windows, wheel arches, and trim. Dennis's hand-printed editions are typically small, and impressions vary in inking density, giving each pull a slightly different character. The doubled-vehicle motif also reflects his interest in the everyday street as still-life — automobiles parked or idling, treated with the same observational stillness he gave to fishing boats and storefronts.