Holle weg in Limburg 1869 - 1937

Anton L. Koster made this etching of a hollow road in Limburg without stating exactly when, but it probably came about through an awful lot of looking. The image is built up from so many tiny marks, a whole universe of hatching, cross-hatching, stippling. The whole thing shimmers. At first it looks like a photorealistic scene, but the closer you get, the more it dissolves into abstraction. If you really try, you can just about feel the texture of the dirt road, the rough grass, the thicket of trees at the top of the hill. I think of Morandi, another artist completely dedicated to the close observation of things, and how a lifetime of looking can bring you closer to the truth of things. You start to realise that meaning isn’t fixed, that every picture contains countless possibilities, and that the job of the artist is to coax them into being.