Composition X - Dynamic Rhythm 1934

Werner Drewes made this black and white woodcut sometime in the 20th century. What strikes me is how the white parts seem to emerge from the dark, like a dance of positive and negative space. It reminds us that making art isn't just about putting something down, but also about what you leave out. The textures here are all about the hand, you can almost feel the gouge of the tool that Drewes used to carve the block. The dark areas are solid, but the grain of the wood gives them a kind of life. There’s a shape in the upper right that looks like an arrow puncturing an amorphous blob. Is it violent? Is it a symbol of change? The way the artist interrupts the flow with the cross-hair markings encourages you to slow down and consider the relationships between all the elements of the work. Drewes was part of a whole community of artists playing with abstraction, folks like Kandinsky and the Bauhaus crew. It's like they were all having this conversation, pushing and pulling at the edges of what art could be. And, like any good conversation, it's still going on today.