Birds 1962

Jerome Kaplan made this print, Birds, in 1963, and it looks like he worked at speed, maybe with charcoal or lithographic crayon. There's a real energy in the marks, almost frantic, like he's trying to capture something before it disappears. I love how the texture is so present. You can almost feel the paper grain pushing through the image. See the way he's built up these layers of dark, scratchy lines, then left these patches of white peeking through? It makes me think about how we see things, not as solid objects, but as fleeting glimpses, always shifting and changing. And then there are these smudged areas where he's really worked the surface, blurring the lines between the birds and the background. Kaplan reminds me a bit of Cy Twombly, in that both artists embrace a kind of messy, intuitive approach to mark-making, letting the process itself become part of the meaning. It's like they're saying, "Hey, art doesn't have to be perfect, it can be raw and imperfect and still beautiful."