Zanderij aan Kanaal 1899 - 1928

Jan Toorop made this print, Zanderij aan Kanaal, with etching. Look at these lines, it’s a drawing but on metal. It’s like he's scratching the surface, searching for something. Imagine Toorop, bent over the plate, acid fumes, digging in, trying to pull an image out of thin air. I am always curious about what artists are thinking. Maybe he was thinking about the docks, the canal, what it means to move things from one place to another. Is the man at the center poling a boat, or fishing? The etching itself is kind of murky, washy, full of atmosphere and fog. It makes me think of Whistler, those grey nocturnes, or maybe some of those early modernists trying to capture the feeling of a place, not just the look of it. It’s all connected, right? We’re all just riffing off each other, trying to find our own way of seeing, our own way of making marks. And sometimes, those marks, they lead us to places we never expected.