Macbeth og Hexene 1902

Oluf Hartmann made this etching of Macbeth and the witches sometime around the turn of the last century, and it feels like he’s dug right into the metal, hasn’t he? I love the way the cross-hatching creates these little nests of darkness, and how that dark space is kind of eating away at the figures. Look at the way the witches emerge, all spindly fingers and jutting noses, from the gloom. Hartmann really lets the process speak here: you can almost feel the artist dragging the tool across the plate, building up tone and texture with each pass. It's like he's conjuring these figures from the shadows, one line at a time. It reminds me a little of Goya, that same sense of the grotesque lurking just beneath the surface of reality. In both, there's a feeling that art isn't just about representation, but about wrestling with something dark and unknowable.