Doode spreeuw 1919

This is Johannes Frederik Engelbert ten Klooster’s print of a dead starling. Made with a dark, inky substance, it looks like it could have come into being through trial, error, and intuition. Poor little bird. What must it have been like to create this image? To see this small creature, now stilled, and to want to capture its likeness, its essence? You can almost feel the physicality of the medium— the artist manipulating the ink to shape our experience, and contributing to the work's emotional and intellectual resonance. Look at how the claw gesture communicates feeling, intention, and meaning. You can imagine the artist seeing other prints that inspired them to pick up their tools and create this image. Artists are in an ongoing conversation, exchanging ideas across time, inspiring each other’s creativity. It is a beautiful thing, painting, this embodied expression, which embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations and meaning over fixed or definitive readings.