Tuin in Verona 1903 - 1932

Adriaan van 't Hoff made this etching of a garden in Verona; he drew into the plate, and it came into being by wiping away ink. He made this in a subtractive way, dragging a sharp tool across a metal plate, working into the resistance of the copper. I like to think about what he was thinking when he made it. I wonder if the process of making prints offered him a different way of seeing, thinking, and experiencing the world. Look how he used dark vertical lines to create those slender trees. It's kind of wild, the way they lead your eye up and out of the frame. You can really feel that particular way of mark-making, the way the artist is in conversation with other artists. It’s like they're bouncing ideas off each other across time. It's that embodied expression of an etching which is all about ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations.