De rouwende Maria 1918

Emil Orlik made this etching, De rouwende Maria, working with line to create tone, shadow and depth. I can imagine him in the studio, working the metal plate, the acid biting into it, slowly, methodically, line by line, wiping the plate clean and starting again. Like drawing, but more indirect, with the metal and acid mediating. I wonder if Orlik felt a sense of loss like the one depicted in the picture. Did he use art to process grief? There's a beautiful economy in the marks; a kind of shorthand that leaves so much open to interpretation. The fabric around her head could almost be clouds, as if the depth of her grief is all encompassing. Is it the loss of a son? A lover? Her youth? I think of Käthe Kollwitz, another German artist preoccupied with similar themes of mourning and loss. Art making is, in the end, a conversation across time and space, full of these open questions. What is grief anyway? A fixed state? Or something more amorphous, unknowable, resistant to definition?