Stripes Out of Silence

Stripes Out of Silence begins in darkness. Out of a deep, unbroken black, a zebra turns its head toward the viewer, and for a moment the void itself seems to organize into pattern, into presence, into something alive.

The image is not painted or printed onto the surface. It is revealed through controlled scratches on acrylic glass, a field of marks that catches and bends the light until stripes emerge where there was only emptiness. No paint. No print. No ink. Only removal, and what removal uncovers.

There is something quietly symbolic in choosing a zebra for this process. Each animal carries a pattern entirely its own, a kind of identity hidden inside what looks, from a distance, like pure repetition. The work mirrors that idea. Up close it is a field of controlled surface damage, individual and unrepeatable. From afar, it resolves into a single, monumental face looking back at you.

As the light shifts and the viewer moves, the zebra drifts between clarity and absence, never fully fixed, never fully gone. It feels less like a portrait captured than a presence allowed to surface, briefly, out of silence.

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, a visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure.

"Even in total darkness, a pattern finds a way to be seen."

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

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