Gloomy Face, Self-portrait 1922

Walter Gramatté made this etching, Gloomy Face, Self-portrait, and you can see how he’s using line to build up this intense, shadowed face. It feels like he's really digging into the plate, right? Look at those horizontal marks over the eyes, like blinds pulled down. It's not just about representing a face; it’s about the process of making a face, scratching it into existence. The network of lines isn’t trying to hide itself. It's all there on the surface. The texture is almost like a topographical map, each scratch telling a story. It makes me think about Käthe Kollwitz, another German artist who wasn't afraid to show the rough edges of life, using the printmaking process to express a raw kind of emotion. Art's not always about pretty pictures, right? Sometimes it's about wrestling with the stuff that’s hard to look at, and in that struggle, we find something real.