Twee vrouwenfiguren met vogels en een hond 1921

Jules Germain made this curious ink drawing, ‘Two Female Figures with Birds and a Dog,’ at some point in his career. The drawing has an almost dream-like quality; the pale hues and blurred lines create a sense of being untethered. I really get a sense of the material qualities here, I can almost feel the texture of the paper through the transparent washes of ink. Germain isn’t trying to trick us into thinking this is “real life,” it’s a surface with marks on it, and those marks create a space for thinking. The ink sort of bleeds and pools, creating soft edges and a hazy atmosphere. I’m drawn to the face of the figure in the hat, it's kind of smudgy and vague, yet so expressive. The flattening of form and space reminds me of Édouard Vuillard, or perhaps even a feverish imagining of a set design by Picasso, blurring boundaries between abstraction and figuration. It’s this kind of ambiguity that keeps me coming back to art.