What's Your Sign?

If you were born between October 23 and November 22, your sun sign is Scorpio, the Scorpion.

Werner Drewes's woodcut conjures the arachnid and its venomous sting with bold colors and an abstracted composition. This work also provides clues to some of the artist's ideas.

Werner Drewes was interested in the natural sciences and believed that art provided an avenue to understanding the mysteries of life:

"What is the mystery underlying the Architecture of our Universe? What are the laws which create the pattern of frost which forms on our windows? What causes the stars to stay in their orbit? What is it which creates joy and sorrow within us?… All these are problems belonging to the world we live in and which should concern the artist, as well as those problems of sunlight or growth of a tree. But art is also a world with its own laws, whether they underlie a painting of realistic or abstract forms.…

"To create new universes within these laws and to fill them with the experiences of our life is our task.… When they convincingly reflect the wisdom or struggle of the soul a work of art is born."

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).

Pictured: Werner Drewes, 1899 Germany–1985 USA, Scorpion, 1946, color woodcut on paper, 12 1/4 x 18 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Wolfram U. Drewes, Harald Drewes, and Bernard W. Drewes.