Heuvellandschap met jager 1939

This is Lodewijk Schelfhout's etching, Heuvellandschap met jager. Look at the beautiful, dark blacks! It’s almost like he’s coaxing forms out of the shadows. The mark-making is fascinating. You’ve got the stark, graphic quality of the foliage and architectural details in the top half of the print, but then in the lower third there’s this looseness, a network of sinuous lines describing these, almost cartoonish, rocks. There's a push-and-pull between clarity and ambiguity, which gets to the heart of artmaking as a process. Is the process concealed or obscured? No! The placement of the hunter, tucked away in the lower-left, adds to the dreamlike quality of the piece. He doesn't quite seem to belong in the landscape. I can't help but think of Piranesi's etchings of ancient Rome, and those tiny figures dwarfed by the scale of the ruins. Schelfhout's print, like Piranesi's, is a reminder that art is an ongoing conversation, full of echoes and reinterpretations.