The Parents 1919

This is a drawing called 'The Parents' by Kathe Kollwitz. She worked with charcoal and soft, smudgy lines to bring the image into being, shifting and emerging, trial and error, all intuition. I can sympathize with Kollwitz, and imagine what it was like to create this. What was she thinking? Her marks, rubbed and layered, accumulate into a density of feeling. The texture of the paper becomes part of the image, as the drawing emerges from it. Look at the father’s hands; clasped and resting. This gesture speaks to a life of hard labor and a quiet resignation. I think about her wider practice and of other painters like Paula Modersohn-Becker. These artists are in an ongoing conversation across time. Painting as a form of embodied expression embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations. It’s not fixed, and certainly never definitive.