Muze van de muziek met Amor 1905

This piece, "Muze van de muziek met Amor," was made by Henri Fantin-Latour. The artist uses a muted palette, almost monochromatic, giving the piece a dreamlike quality, which chimes with my own view that artmaking is about capturing the ephemeral. There's a beautiful softness to the lithographic crayon here. The texture feels almost like velvet, and I wonder what it was like to make these marks. The artist builds up these hazy forms using tiny, soft marks; look at the way the background blurs and shifts. This creates a sense of depth and ambiguity, like a memory fading at the edges. I love how he uses a smattering of marks to create the suggestion of form, like the small figure to the right. Fantin-Latour reminds me of Odilon Redon, who embraced the possibilities of lithography to create his own strange symbolic world. Just like in painting, there’s a place for the unexpected in printmaking, an embrace of experimentation.