Grafteken van Isaac Sweerts door Rombout Verhulst in de Oude Kerk te Amsterdam 1911

This black and white photograph documents Rombout Verhulst's "Grafteken van Isaac Sweerts" in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. I find myself imagining the sculptor's process here, the back and forth between the artist and the stone, pushing and pulling at the medium to realize their vision, shifting and emerging through trial and intuition. I feel such sympathy for the artist, you know? What might it have been like to carve such intricate details, the cherubs, the drapery, the bust of Sweerts himself? The material aspects of the sculpture—its texture, its form, its three-dimensionality—shape our experience of it. Take, for example, the cherubs on either side of the central inscription; the gesture of their soft bodies communicates feeling and meaning. These artists are in an ongoing conversation, don’t you think? They're in an exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity. Sculpture, like painting, is a form of embodied expression. It embraces ambiguity, which allows for multiple interpretations over fixed or definitive readings.