Kar trekken before 1935

Reinier van den Berg’s 'Kar trekken' is an intimate little print made sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century; it looks like it's rendered in a chalky, warm grey. It's all about the layering of tiny marks to build up form. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the plate. The piece has this hazy, dreamlike quality because of the limited tonal range. It's like looking at a memory. See the way the artist uses a flurry of marks to create the figures struggling to pull their cart. There’s a real physicality there. It reminds me of the gritty realism of Käthe Kollwitz, who also captured the weight of human struggle with such raw emotion. Art is always a conversation. We respond to what we see, adding our own voice to the chorus, reinterpreting and reimagining. Just like life, it's never fixed or simple. It’s always moving, changing, and evolving.