Cypress trees 1902

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva made this woodcut print of Cypress Trees using black ink. I see these solid, dark, almost gothic shapes towering over the landscape; these dark, gothic silhouettes set against the white of the paper. It’s almost like she’s composing with light and dark, pushing and pulling space with just two tones. I wonder, was she thinking about the starkness of Russian Constructivism or maybe even the tonal drama of someone like Käthe Kollwitz when she made this? I can imagine her carving into the wood, the resistance of the material, the deliberate choices of what to leave and what to remove. Those cuts are so precise. It’s all about contrast and the balance between the solid forms and the negative space. Artists, we’re all just magpies, aren’t we? Picking up shiny bits from each other across time. We see something in another artist’s work, and it sparks something in us, leading us down our own path of discovery. That's how art evolves, through conversation and exchange, creating something new from what came before.