Girl with Frogs 1917

Heinrich Campendonk made this woodcut, Girl with Frogs, sometime in the early 20th century, and what strikes me is how he's embraced the directness of the medium. You can really sense the artist carving into the wood, making decisive marks. It's a beautiful, simple, and quite surreal image. Look at the texture, how the black ink sits against the bare paper. The areas of flat colour have a real graphic punch, but the carving of the wood also creates subtle variations, a kind of visual hum. See the strange black circles, like polka dots, floating around the girl and frogs? It’s a playful touch. Campendonk's work often combined elements of folk art with modernism, which you can see in artists like Marc Chagall, so there's a sense of magic and storytelling. Ultimately, with a piece like this, it's about letting your mind wander. What do these frogs mean to you?