{"product_id":"a-mind-scratched-into-stairways","title":"A Mind Scratched Into Stairways","description":"\u003cp\u003eA profile emerges from the black as a single pale line, forehead, nose, lips, chin, and inside that outline, where a mind should simply be, a structure of stairs, corridors and small doors climbs and turns and climbs again. One tiny figure stands at a lit threshold near the jaw, lamp raised, about to go on.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo paint. No print. No ink. What you see is a field of individual marks worked into the surface of the acrylic glass, a field of fine scratches that catches light and holds it, step by step, landing by landing, until a staircase that could never be built stands there anyway.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe architecture is the only part of this head that glows. The profile itself, the brow, the closed eye, the set of the mouth, stays dark, a silhouette cut whole out of the brightness it carries inside. The figure and its long shadow remain darker still, the one untouched shape moving through a skull made of light.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe image is always present in the acrylic glass, in every hour and every light. Light does not create it, it sharpens it: under a direct source the stairwells deepen and the small doors seem to open further into the head, and from another angle the same structure settles, quieter, more like a thought remembered than a place seen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Mind Scratched Into Stairways belongs to Look Twice, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of following a mind that keeps climbing through a logic it will never resolve, and does not stop for that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom across a room the head reads as one calm silhouette with a maze for a mind. Standing close, that maze breaks into the controlled surface damage that built it, countless small cuts holding countless small stairs, none of them going anywhere a floor plan could explain.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is no despair in it, only the quiet, almost comic persistence of the figure with the lamp, still walking, still finding a next step. Perhaps that is what a mind does, climbing through rooms of itself that never quite resolve into one shape, and perhaps that is also, in its way, a kind of peace.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Every mind is a staircase that folds back on itself, and still, something in us keeps the lamp lit.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMore about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eQuestions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"TD Fine Art Studio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59672803443013,"sku":null,"price":4500.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0904\/0724\/0005\/files\/A_Mind_Scratched_Into_Stairways_thumbnail.jpg?v=1791705345","url":"https:\/\/tdfineartstudio.com\/products\/a-mind-scratched-into-stairways","provider":"TD Fine Art Studio","version":"1.0","type":"link"}