Warmth We Still Share

Warmth We Still Share holds a single, quiet moment: two people who have spent a lifetime beside each other, folded into one chair, wrapped in the same quilt, watching a fire that is slowly going out. There is nothing left to prove between them, only presence, only the warmth they keep making for one another long after the flame has thinned to embers.

The image is not painted or printed onto the acrylic glass. It is scratched into it, drawn out through controlled surface damage rather than added with pigment or ink. No paint. No print. No ink. Up close, the couple dissolves into a field of fine, deliberate scratches, a surface that feels almost restless. Step back, and the two figures return, monumental, tender, unmistakably human.

The work is always present, with or without directed light. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. Under a hard, angled light the scratches catch and reflect, the contrast deepens, and the piece reads differently from every angle, moving between clarity and quiet without ever leaving the surface.

That shifting light becomes part of the story. A dying fire gives less and less, yet these two remain lit from within, by habit, by memory, by the simple decision to stay close. The negative space around them, black and total, is not emptiness. It is everything the years have quietly taken away, leaving only what still matters.

Warmth We Still Share 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, and where the most lasting warmth is the kind two people choose to keep sharing.

"Even as the fire fades, they remain each other's light."

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

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