Marilyn in Silver Curls

She turns her back to the room and to the camera, the famous curls catching what little light there is while the shoulders and the near side of her face settle into a darkness so complete it becomes a presence of its own.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is worked directly into the surface of the acrylic glass through controlled scratches, each one a small removal rather than an addition, until hair, shoulder and the faint edge of a cheek emerge from what has been taken away.

The image is always there, in daylight as much as under a single lamp. Light does not create it. It sharpens it: under direct light the curls catch and hold a silver shine, the contrast deepens, and the piece reads differently as you move past it, without ever losing her.

Few faces have been looked at as often as this one. Here she withholds it, giving only the back of her head and the line of a shoulder, and the portrait becomes less about being seen than about the moment just before turning away.

From across a room it reads as one gesture of silver light against black, monumental and still. Closer, that gesture breaks into a dense field of individual scratches, only resolving into a face, a shoulder, a woman, at a certain distance.

Marilyn in Silver Curls continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print.

"What is taken away becomes the light that remains."

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

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