Boats 1918

Cesar Klein made this woodcut, ‘Boats’, in 1918. What I love about woodcuts is the way that the mark making is so present. You feel like you can see the artist’s hand moving through the material. There's this immediate, graphic quality, and then there’s also this weird tension between flatness and depth. He uses only two colors, black and white. It's about simplification, reduction, paring things down to their essence. I love the way he uses these thick, juicy lines to describe the boats, but then also these little, tiny details like the figures standing in the boat. Then there are these arcs looming over the boats, which could be a rainbow or perhaps some weird halo. The whole image feels a little dreamlike, a little bit surreal. It reminds me of the woodcuts of the German Expressionist Emil Nolde, who was also interested in capturing a feeling or emotion rather than depicting a realistic scene. For me, it's this idea that art isn't just about what you see, but about how you feel.