Bos in de winter 2010

Dirck Nab carved this black-and-white scene of 'Bos in de winter' – or 'Woods in Winter' – out of a block of something, probably wood, sometime around 2010. Imagine him, methodically gouging out the negative space, guided by the play of light and shadow. He's creating a stark, somewhat spooky space out of the simplest means. It makes me think about a similar print made by Edvard Munch, in 1896, showing a forest. Munch did so many forests! It's interesting, the way Nab uses white lines to suggest form, like the trunks of the trees. See how they’re not perfectly straight, but have a kind of wobbly, organic quality? These are the traces of the artist’s hand, cutting into the block, making tiny variations in pressure and angle, each mark adding up to something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s just like how an artist talks to other artists, and adds their own little comment to a conversation that’s been going on forever.