Nachtelijk gezicht op het Damrak c. 1905 - 1906

Willem Witsen made this print of the Damrak, probably sometime between 1880 and 1920. The whole scene is swathed in a velvety dark ink, and the way he’s scratched the surface is just gorgeous, like he was coaxing light out of the night. I can imagine Witsen, hunched over his plate, working those lines, maybe thinking about Whistler or some of those other nocturnal painters. How do you capture something so fleeting, the way the lights flicker on the water or how the buildings loom in the darkness? It’s all about touch, right? The pressure of the tool, the quality of the ink, even the paper itself. Each mark seems to carry a little piece of Witsen’s soul. I love how the artist’s hand, his vision, comes through in the end. We’re all in this big conversation together, wrestling with the same problems, trying to make sense of the world, one mark at a time.