Compositie (Stilleven) 1916

Jacoba van Heemskerck made this graphic composition, a still life, and it's a whole adventure in black and white! I can imagine her, maybe hunched over a table, digging into the block with her tools, each line a decision, a little battle between control and letting go. You know? Look at the way she's carved out these shapes. Some are so precise and geometric, but then you have this loose, almost scratchy texture filling in the background. It’s as if she's trying to find some kind of order in a messy world – or maybe she is creating the mess, who knows? It’s easy to see the influence of Cubism here, the way she’s broken everything down into planes and angles. What I find really cool is how she’s managed to make something so abstract and yet, it still feels like a still life. You can almost make out the bowl of fruit, but then again, maybe it's just my brain trying to make sense of it all. The magic is in the back and forth.