Abklatsch van de krijttekening op pagina 46 1875 - 1934

This transfer drawing was made by Isaac Israels, who was born in the Netherlands, from a chalk drawing. It's like a ghostly echo of the original. I love seeing the trace of a process, like forensic evidence of creativity. You can almost feel the pressure of the artist’s hand, smudging and blurring the chalk as it lifts from one surface to another. Look closely, and you can see how the textures have been created – the delicate dusting of chalk in one area, versus the more solid marks somewhere else. It reminds me that artmaking is always an act of translation, of finding a new language to describe something already there. It's like de Kooning said, "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgarity." Think of artists like Cy Twombly or even Gerhard Richter, all wrestling with the same questions of process, gesture, and the elusive nature of representation.