Slakken en kikkers 1884 - 1935

Maurits van der Valk made this print, Slakken en kikkers, using etching. Look how the cool blue ink delicately describes the textures of these snail shells. The composition seems simple enough, but the longer I look the stranger it gets. The shells loom large in the foreground and this tiny frog sits right at the bottom edge of the image, as if it’s about to hop right out of the picture. What I love most about etching is the way the artist has to commit to each mark. It's a slow process, a kind of drawing with acid, and you can really see Van der Valk thinking through the tonal relationships. The shells are almost floating in a sea of blue, caught between weightlessness and dense materiality. For me, this piece has echoes of M. C. Escher, especially in the way it plays with perspective and scale, creating a world that’s both familiar and strangely surreal. It reminds us that art is always an ongoing conversation, a dialogue between seeing and imagining.