Breda 1888 - 1931

Willem Adrianus Grondhout made this print of Breda using etching techniques sometime between 1900 and 1934. There's something so immediate about etchings. You can see the hand of the artist, the cross-hatching almost a kind of nervous energy translated onto the plate. It's like a direct line to their thinking process. I wonder what Grondhout was thinking as he etched these lines? Was he trying to capture the grandeur of the architecture, or perhaps the everyday life unfolding in front of it? And what about the bareness of the church, is he conveying a sense of change, of something being built or taken away? He shows us the building, bare and unfinished, naked even. The way the lines vary in thickness and density – it reminds me that painting, and printmaking too, is really just a collection of marks, each one a decision, a response to the moment. Ultimately it's these decisions that add up to the artwork.