Vlucht voor de bui 1918

This print, *Vlucht voor de bui*, made by Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkamp, looks like it was made with some sort of etching tool, the kind that requires a lot of physical pressure. I can almost feel the artist scratching away, trying to capture something about the weather, about nature's textures. Look at the repeated marks that create the image. It's a symphony of short, etched lines. The figure is secondary to the landscape—see how they're hunched over, shielding themselves from the elements? The landscape seems to swallow the figure. I wonder, what’s it like to spend that much time thinking about tree trunks? There's a kind of obsessive quality, like someone working through an idea, or maybe just enjoying the sheer physicality of mark-making. I think of artists like Van Gogh and Munch who dug deep into the landscape to express their feelings, finding a way to depict nature as not just a backdrop, but as a carrier of emotional weather. Artists are always talking to each other this way—across time—aren't they?