Drie bomen 1913

Jan Mankes made this tiny etching, Drie Bomen, or Three Trees, at some point in his short life using a painstaking method of scratching lines into a metal plate. You can almost feel him breathing as he concentrates, right? The overall effect is like a whisper, not a shout. Look closely at how the delicate lines coalesce to form the trees and the ground, and then dissolve into the misty background. The marks are so fine, so close together, that they create a velvety texture, like a memory fading at the edges. The bare branches and the subtle gradations of tone give the image a melancholic feel, don’t you think? There’s this tension between precision and a kind of hazy, dreamlike quality. Mankes reminds me of Agnes Martin, actually, in the way they both use a restrained palette and repetitive marks to create an atmosphere of quiet contemplation. But while Martin went big, Mankes stayed small.