Oude vrouw met wasgoed c. 1950 - 1971

Dirkje Kuik made this etching called ‘Oude Vrouw Met Wasgoed’ or ‘Old woman with Laundry’ without giving us a specific date. I like to imagine Kuik bent over the plate, applying acid, wiping, and re-etching. I love the way she captured the weight of the figures, bowed under the weight of the washing and, maybe, the weight of time itself. You can see her working through the forms, trying to grasp something that flickers in front of her. I sympathize with the way she's captured the old woman: sometimes, it takes lots of attempts to find a feeling. She used a dark palette, but it’s the scratched, thin lines that really speak. See how they build up the faces? There’s this amazing swirl of lines around the head of the main figure – it makes me think of Käthe Kollwitz, and also, weirdly, Cy Twombly, who was also so good at capturing feeling with just a few well-placed, scrabbled lines. It’s like they are all in conversation across time, wrestling with the same questions about how to capture something essential about human life.