Twee varkens 1924

Jo Bezaan made this monochromatic woodcut of two pigs sometime in her life between 1894 and 1952. I like to think of the artist, carefully carving away at the wood, thinking about what to leave, and what to take away. It's a reductive process, kinda like life. The composition is divided into fields of hatched lines and blocks of solid ink. The texture of the wood creates a tactile surface and the artist uses it to emphasize the bodies of the animals. I wonder if she empathized with these creatures, stuck in their pen, lazing about the sty. Their weightiness is communicated so well. They are pressed into the earth. Bezaan was working at a time when artists were experimenting with abstraction, but here she chooses to represent the everyday. It reminds me of Paula Modersohn-Becker's paintings of rural life. I see the same kind of intimate, earnest observation of farm animals and peasants. Artists respond to artists, it’s all one big conversation through time.