Two Trucks

A color woodcut from Dennis's mid-career period, Two Trucks centers on a paired vehicular subject — likely working trucks of the kind that populate Pacific Northwest waterfronts and small industrial yards. The use of color rather than the black-and-white of much of his earlier print work indicates Dennis registering the trucks through several blocks, with separate impressions for body color, ground, sky, and outline. This aligns the technique with the nishiki-e (brocade picture) tradition of multiple-block color woodblock printing developed in 18th-century Japan, though Dennis's palette tends to be earthbound rather than decorative. The pairing of vehicles within a single image is a compositional habit Dennis returned to repeatedly — compare Uphill, Two Cars from 1990 — and reflects his interest in symmetry and counterpoint as organizing devices for otherwise unposed industrial scenes. The trucks read as flat silhouettes weighted across the picture plane.