Farbiger Holzschnitt Zwei Schwäne 1902

Otto Eckmann made this color woodcut of two swans sometime around 1900. He was part of this movement, Jugendstil, which was the German version of Art Nouveau. Look how he's got the black and white reversed, so that the darkness of the water becomes almost like a night sky. This is what I'm always trying to do in my work, to invert the figure and the ground so you're not sure what’s what. It makes you look at everything differently. I can imagine him, Eckmann, carefully carving each line. The way the water looks, the ripples, must have been so precise, so painstaking. I can feel his hand moving as I look at it. It's like he's trying to capture not just what the swans look like, but what it feels like to be there, watching them float. Eckmann reminds us that image-making is a conversation between seeing and feeling, and it's been going on for centuries.