Vajda Lajos Kopony Madárral 1939 1939

Vajda Lajos made this work, Skull with Bird, in 1939 using etching. There’s a lot of cross-hatching, a skull form, and a bird shape, all woven together into this strange and wonderful image, and it's printed in black and white, so it feels kind of haunted. The artist must have been going through something pretty intense. I imagine him hunched over the etching plate, scratching away, lost in thought. Was he trying to make sense of life and death, or maybe just working through some personal stuff? The lines are so deliberate, yet the overall effect is kind of dreamy and surreal. It reminds me a little bit of Goya's dark, unsettling works, but with a touch of folksy charm thrown in. Artists are always riffing off each other, even across time. And ultimately, painting and printmaking, they’re really embodied forms of expression. We don’t need to pin down one single meaning. Instead, we can embrace the ambiguity and let the artwork spark our own imagination.