Woodman c. 1920s

Alexander Zerdin Kruse made this print, titled "Woodman", using some kind of graphic medium, probably in the first half of the twentieth century. What’s striking here is how the artist uses the gritty texture of the paper to describe the hard work of the woodcutter. Look closely, and you can see these tiny marks – a myriad of little strokes – that build up the figure, the wood, and the surrounding landscape. It’s like he’s translating the physical effort of the woodcutter into the labor of mark-making. There's a real physicality in the way the image is built, like he's sculpting it out of pure tone. The man's face is shadowed, his gaze fixed downwards, lost in the act. The surrounding landscape is built in a similar way; the dark marks and contrasts seem to almost blend into the man, a suggestion of the hard and unyielding nature of the world he occupies. It reminds me of Käthe Kollwitz, another artist who understood the power of graphic media to convey human struggle. In the end, both artists understood that art is an open-ended conversation, not a closed book.