Boerderij 1918

This is a woodcut print called Boerderij, made by Gustave De Smet in 1918. Look at the dramatic contrast between the dark, inky blacks and stark whites. Can you imagine the artist carving away at the wood, deciding what to keep and what to discard? There's a push and pull between representation and abstraction here that I really love. The image feels almost like a memory, fragmented and reassembled. I wonder, was De Smet thinking about the angularity of Cubism? Or maybe the simplified forms of folk art? The way he's handled the trees, they're not just trees, right? They're these jagged, almost aggressive shapes. What's that about? And the house—it's like a child's drawing of a house, but somehow imbued with this strange, unsettling energy. It's like De Smet is inviting us to see the world through his eyes, a world that's both familiar and utterly strange. That's how artists speak to each other, across time and space, riffing on ideas, pushing boundaries, and showing us new ways of seeing and feeling.