Arrestatie van kale man door soldaten 1953

Valentin le Campion made this print of the arrest of a bald man by soldiers with ink on paper sometime around the turn of the 20th century. Look at the amount of detail here. It's really something! I'm thinking about Campion working on this, how he used the tools to make the marks, cutting away the paper to build this image. You have to know what you’re doing to take away material like that. There’s no going back. The dark ink of the image really pops from the light of the paper. He’s playing with light and dark, almost like a chiaroscuro painting, drawing the eye in. The bald man, the soldiers, and the figures in the background must have been inspired by something. It makes me wonder what was going on at that time. What was Campion thinking? Whose side was he on? That's the thing about art: it gets us thinking and connecting. It builds on all the art that came before, and all the life that went into it too.