Uphill, Two Cars

A companion to Uphill from the same year, this print reintroduces the steep-street subject with two automobiles inserted into the composition. The cars likely sit at different points on the slope, giving Dennis a way to register grade and depth without resorting to atmospheric perspective. Pacific Northwest cities such as Seattle and Tacoma are full of one-block hill streets where vehicles appear nearly stacked vertically when viewed straight on, and Dennis seems to have found in them a ready-made compositional device. The repeated subject across the two 1990 prints suggests Dennis was working through variations on a single motif, a method consistent with his interest in the ukiyo-e series tradition where multiple states or views of a single location were standard practice. The woodcut's planar blocks of tone read the cars as silhouettes set against the broader architecture of the street, with cut lines reserved for windows, wheels, and roofline edges.