Head of an Old Man with Beard 1902

Edvard Munch made this woodcut, Head of an Old Man with Beard, with black ink on a salmon background and the whole thing looks so graphic! I can imagine him really going at the woodblock with carving tools. He’s channelling something primal here, like those early German Expressionists, Nolde or Kirchner. It’s bold! But I’m also thinking of someone like Gauguin going at the wood, trying to push a simplified language of form. What was Munch thinking? How can I boil down a face to its most powerful elements? How can I get the wood to talk? Look at those gouges around the eyes and the mouth - it's all about those lines, right? Each cut of the wood says, here is a thought, here is a feeling. Artists build on each other - it’s a long conversation, and the history of painting is so full of experimentation. It’s exciting, it’s messy. It embraces ambiguity, but what is so certain is the mark on the page!