Lincoln in the Blue Hour

Lincoln in the Blue Hour brings one of history's most recognisable silhouettes into deep blue coloured mirror glass, the tall stovepipe hat and the gaunt, bearded profile held not by paint or ink but by a field of individual marks scratched into the surface itself.

The face is not printed onto the glass, it is taken from it, formed through removal rather than addition, so what the eye reads as light is really the surface catching and returning it. Up close the portrait dissolves into a field of fine scratches, unreadable as anything but texture, and only from a distance does Lincoln return, monumental and still.

Blue is the colour of dusk, of distance, of the hour when a familiar face starts to soften into memory rather than fact, and here it wraps a president whose likeness has been copied so often that the man himself can feel almost abstract. The scratches keep just enough, the brow, the beard, the weight in the eyes, to hold him present without pretending to hold the whole man.

Around and through that face the room itself appears, walls, light fixtures, the visitor standing in front of the work, all folded into the blue depth of the glass. The viewer is never simply looking at Lincoln, they are standing inside the same reflected space as him, briefly sharing his frame.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. The portrait is always present in the surface, and under a directed light the marks catch and the contrast deepens, but nothing here appears or disappears, only the room around it keeps changing while the man himself stays fixed in blue.

Lincoln in the Blue Hour continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part.

"Some faces are not remembered, they are held."

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

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