Columbus is a sea, drawn as an engraver would draw one. The waves are described entirely in fine parallel lines, thickening and thinning to build the swell, in the tradition of the charts and voyage plates navigators carried before photography. There is nothing on the water, no ship, no whale, no land, and that emptiness was the intention; the design was made as the unpopulated companion to Melville.
Emptied of incident, it becomes a texture. From across a room it reads as a moving plain, the linework producing a fine shimmer that shifts as you pass it, and only close to does the drawing resolve into individual waves. It behaves the way a good grasscloth or strie behaves: as a surface with something happening in it, rather than as a pattern.
It hangs on a half drop with a 68.5 cm repeat on a wide 0.69 m roll, which staggers the swell across widths so no wave lines up with its neighbour and the sea stays convincingly irregular. Use it where a room needs a background with character, in a study, a hall, a bathroom or a bedroom, or as the quiet wall in a scheme that already has a loud one.
