Chinatown Shops 1912

Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt made this print of Chinatown Shops, most likely in the 1920s. It's a delicate thing, isn't it? Like he barely touched the plate. You can imagine him there, bending over the metal, scratching away to catch the scene. I wonder what it was like to stand where Nordfeldt stood, looking at those shops and the people milling about. What did he think of them? It's all so faint, so subtly suggested, but you can almost hear the sounds of the street. The shops with their mysterious signs, the people bundled up in coats, maybe a little wary. Nordfeldt captures something of the quiet mystery, a certain feeling of being an outsider looking in. The whole image is created by a swarm of tiny lines, like he wanted to capture the feeling of a place more than the thing itself. And that, for me, is the magic of painting, of art, of living. It is a conversation across time, a way of seeing and feeling. It's about embracing the not-knowing.