Kale bomen 1987

Kees Stoop made this etching, Kale bomen, which translates to bare trees, at an unknown date. It’s a landscape, rendered with the kind of obsessive mark-making that just gets under my skin in the best possible way. Look at the bottom of the image. It’s an intense forest of tiny vertical marks, like a million little spears all pointing upwards, and somehow, they conjure a field. Then, there’s the band of ghostly marks and beyond that a looming line of trees sketched with a nervous energy. Stoop uses the most minimal of means to evoke a whole world. The scale of the work makes the marks even more powerful. It’s so small, yet so full. It reminds me of Guston’s late work, that same embrace of the gritty and the everyday, the same faith in the power of the single mark to build a universe. It’s a reminder that art isn’t about grand gestures; it’s about the accumulation of tiny, deliberate acts.