Sketches

Thursday 3 May 2018

Auschwitz Birkenau (2)

The entrance to the concentration camp Birkenau.
The trains would pass this gate, and unload the victims on the platforms behind it.

Just a few minutes from their death.
Almost a million victims must have passed these gates.

Horrible.

As you can see, the original drawing was a bit different, the white acrylic marker didn't perform well, and the official guide was waiting.
So I adapted the drawing with gouache and ink into something more fitting.

2 comments:

Michael Lukyniuk said...

Your picture is a lot more effective as a night scene (it's more sinister), than as one in the daytime when you sketched it. What you've done with the gouache or ink also makes me think that it's raining outside (making it once more a little more sinister). I can't think of a more evil place to visit, but I guess that it now stands as a momument against the very people who created and operated it.

Rene Fijten said...

I made sketches both on white paper as on black (I prepared the black ones the day before).
The sketches I posted today (monday) are regular white ones where I just sketched what I saw.
The black ones were meant as an experiment, I wanted to try if I could describe the feeling we had, with an on-location sketch. But it didn't work on location, it looked too much like a night scene. (well observed!)
That's why I reworked the drawings at home with gouache, to get that sinister feeling of that guilty landscape back. Not so much raining as "raw", "gritty", "dirty" or "scratchy".