Lienden 1916

This is Lodewijk Schelfhout's etching, "Lienden," made sometime in the early 20th century. The mark-making is incredible, like a fever dream of tiny scratches bringing this church and landscape into being. You can almost feel him, scratching away at the plate, line by line. There's this incredible tension between light and dark. The church tower is presented as a beacon of light, but all around it, the landscape is a mass of tangled lines. Notice how the etching lines vary - some are deep and confident, others are light and tentative. Look at the way the shading on the left-hand side creates the illusion of depth. It's like he's wrestling with the image, trying to pull it out of the nothingness. Schelfhout's work reminds me of some of Whistler's etchings - that same sense of poetry and melancholia. The piece invites us to embrace the beauty of imperfection, of the unfinished, the ambiguous.