Zonnebloemen 1925

Arnold Pijpers made this print of sunflowers, Zonnebloemen, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. The image has a graphic directness, carved from simple blocks of black and white. I love the tactile quality of this piece, you can almost feel the artist at work, cutting away at the block. The stark contrast between the heavy black and the raw white paper creates a kind of visual drama. Look at the way the petals of the sunflowers are formed, like simplified gestures, the image feels both representational and abstract at the same time. The center of the flower is particularly interesting, with its dense, almost chaotic, network of lines, like a concentrated burst of energy. Pijpers’s process reminds me of the German Expressionist woodcut artists. Both the Expressionists and Pijpers embrace the power of the woodcut to capture raw emotion, while allowing the process to remain clearly visible in the final image. Art is like a conversation across time, echoing and transforming.