Landschap 1918

Gustave De Smet made this landscape print sometime in the first half of the twentieth century using woodcut on paper. The bold contrast between black and white, the cutting away, it’s all so striking. It feels raw and honest, like the artist is wrestling with the material, trying to find a new way of representing the world. The texture here, oh, it’s everything. You can almost feel the grain of the wood, the way the knife dug in, creating these jagged, irregular lines. See that cluster of white shapes at the top? It's like a burst of energy, a flurry of marks that refuse to settle down. And then your eye travels down to these solid black shapes which anchor the composition. It’s all in this constant push and pull, this conversation between dark and light. I can't help but think of Emil Nolde when I see this, another artist who wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty and who embraced the expressive potential of printmaking. De Smet, like Nolde, reminds us that art is not about perfection, but about process, about embracing the unexpected.