A Face Half Drowned in Night

Only the upper half of a face breaks the surface. Wet hair, a glistening line of light across the forehead, and two eyes that hold the viewer without blinking. Everything below the waterline has already disappeared into black.

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. No paint. No print. No ink. The face is scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, drawn out through removal rather than addition, so that what looks like water and skin and shadow is really structure, thousands of decisions about where to take the surface away.

The image is always present. It does not need direct light to exist, but light gives it depth. Under a raking angle, the wet strands of hair and the sheen on the forehead catch and hold the light, and the contrast deepens, pulling the eyes further forward out of the dark. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it.

From across a room, the work reads as a single suspended moment, someone surfacing, or perhaps someone sinking, caught at the exact line where breath still meets air. Step closer and that moment dissolves into a field of controlled scratches, a surface built entirely from marks that only resolve into a face again once you step back.

Water has always been a threshold in the way we picture ourselves, the line between what is shown and what is hidden, between composure and the effort just beneath it. Here that threshold is literal. The face is not fully arrived and not fully gone, held at the point where visibility becomes a choice.

This work is unique. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure.

"Some faces are not revealed. They surface."

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

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.