Zwemmende zwaan before 1939

Tiensje van Schoonhoven van Beurden made "Zwemmende zwaan" as a print, so she must have been thinking about how to use the fewest marks to convey the most information. It's a process of reduction, and that’s similar to how I think about painting, always trying to simplify. You can really see the grain in the woodblock and that gives the image a great texture that the artist plays on to give the swan's feathers volume. I love how the black ink has been applied in such a way that you can see the different strokes, some thick, some thin, and how those different marks give the water this incredible reflective quality. This swan reminds me a bit of some woodcuts by the German Expressionist artist, Erich Heckel, but it has something softer about it.