Landscape 1940 - 1943

Edvard Munch’s ‘Landscape’ shimmers in pale gold and green. I can imagine Munch inking the woodblock, pressing it, pulling it up—a back and forth dance with the material itself. You know, painting is a lonely gig. I think of Munch in his studio, trying to make marks that somehow capture the vastness of the world. See how the horizontal grain of the wood creates these striations, like the surface of water? And then these little vertical scratches that make me think of trees, or maybe just, like, raw feeling. It reminds me of woodcuts made by German Expressionists. It’s like he's thinking about the surface, how the wood itself becomes part of the image. I wonder if he knew he was participating in this long, ongoing conversation between artists. It’s a conversation about how to see, how to feel, how to translate that into something physical. It's so vulnerable! It makes me want to run back to my studio and wrestle with paint.