A Boy Runs Through Light

An old man stands with his back to us, his bowler hat and cane holding him in a stillness that reads as permanent. Beside him the wall has become something else entirely, a field of fine scratches that catches and holds the light, while his own figure remains a dark, untouched silhouette against it.

Within that lit field, a second shape waits. A boy runs with a kite, cast as a shadow that the light itself seems to have shaped. He is cut from the same brightness that surrounds him, a dark figure inside a field of marks rather than a figure drawn upon it. No paint, no print, no ink. The image is scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, present whether the light is direct or soft, and the light only deepens what is already there.

Seen from across a room, the work reads as a single quiet scene, a man watching something move along a wall. Up close it dissolves into a field of individual marks, each one small and deliberate, together holding the shape of a boy who is running and a kite that is still rising.

The story underneath is simple and does not need to be explained. The man is the shadow, and the shadow is the man, long before the hat and the cane and the stillness. Art with Scratch has always been drawn to that kind of doubling, the self held against who it once was, the present figure standing still while an old motion keeps happening just behind him.

This work continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. It reads differently from different angles, without ever losing the image. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it.

This work is unique.

"The boy keeps running. The man only learned to stand still."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

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