Liggende vrouw met gitaar 1915

Reijer Stolk made this etching of a reclining woman with a guitar sometime before 1945. Look at those lines, the way he’s built up the image from a mass of tiny strokes, like a drawing made of whispers. You can almost feel the scratching of the needle on the plate, it's a real process-based piece. The texture is everything here, isn’t it? All those crisscrossing lines creating shadows, giving form to the woman and the guitar. The lines create the illusion of depth and volume, but it’s also flat and graphic, like a newsprint image. See the lines that form the curve behind the figure? They're not describing anything exactly, but they create this atmosphere, this almost claustrophobic feeling, which really adds to the mood. This piece reminds me of work by Paula Modersohn-Becker, the way she captured the weight and presence of the human form with simple lines. Art is about feeling, about seeing, and maybe more about questioning than knowing.