De brandweer van de maan c. 1902

'De brandweer van de maan', or 'The Fire Department of the Moon', is undated but was made with printmaking techniques by Pellerin & Cie. It's interesting to me how the artist organizes the marks, or rather, the story here. The composition is like a flow chart, except instead of steps there are all these little windows, snapshots of absurd activity. And the limited color palette, it all looks like it was printed in the same 3 or 4 colors; red, blue, yellow and black. How the artist decides to use them and how to give meaning to them - you can see it as part of a process. Look at the horse, or pony, the firefighters are riding in the oval scene. The lines describing its musculature are so simple, and economical, but it's completely effective. It's like the artist is thinking of how to describe the horse's body with the least possible effort. I think of artists like Philip Guston, who was similarly interested in the poetics of clumsiness. In the end, art is about exploration and imagination and not just fixed answers.