Jachtstilleven op een plint 1605 - 1678

Curator: Immediately I'm struck by this... spectral quality. It’s like looking at a memory of a hunt. Editor: Yes, the initial impression is quite ghostly. What we are looking at is a pencil drawing entitled "Jachtstilleven op een plint", or "Hunting Still Life on a Plinth," created sometime between 1605 and 1678 by Paul de Vos. Curator: A still life of a hunt – isn’t that a funny thing? It gives you this sort of frozen violence vibe, a picture holding still something that is usually fast, like BAM! Caught. Editor: The technique here contributes significantly to that feeling. De Vos's use of pencil on paper creates a delicacy, almost a fragility. The sketch-like quality suggests the immediacy of the hunt. Curator: Absolutely. I can almost see him drawing right there at the end of the hunt! Did you ever stop and just felt that weird quiet when hunters bring something back? This captures that weird mix, you know? It's almost religious or mythical. It does for me. Editor: I find myself more drawn to the compositional choices. The placement of the plinth, for example, it’s a stage. Each element contributes to a sense of constructed artifice; it isn't nature; it is a rendering, not an environment. Curator: See? That's what I mean. Totally otherworldly in that little staging. To me it goes far beyond being some representation. Editor: The open composition, too, allows the viewer’s eye to wander, completing the implied narrative. What is left unseen somehow feels as significant as what is rendered in pencil. Curator: Well, to me it's also interesting as a reminder that what we call "nature" has always been shaped and curated by humans in some way, always with our intervention at some point. Like an artifact. That is there and no longer can become itself. Editor: Indeed. A piece such as this reminds us that the role of art and how much an image has the potential to become or signify something very important, in life and reality. Curator: It does feel special when an artist can make a single image trigger so many reflections on ourselves.