Portret van Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen 1877 - 1942

Henriëtte de Vries made this portrait of Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen using etching. It’s all about the line, isn’t it? The patient, tiny, and obsessive line. Check out the way the shadows define his face. The artist builds up these areas of tone with countless short lines, each one placed with careful precision. You can almost feel the scratch of the needle on the plate, the repetitive motion that slowly coaxes an image into being. Look at the area around the eyes, the delicate web of lines capturing the way the skin creases and folds with age. See how the artist uses the same approach to describe his sternum. It reminds me a bit of the drawings of someone like Philip Guston, not in terms of style, but in the way that the image emerges through a kind of meditative process. You get a sense of the artist working something out as she goes, feeling her way through the image one line at a time. And that, for me, is the essence of art-making: it’s not about the finished product, it’s about the doing.