Pad in een landschap 1905 - 1910

Willem Cornelis Rip made this pencil drawing, ‘Path in a Landscape,’ in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. Look at the way he lays down the graphite, quickly building up the forms, the trees and tower emerging out of a haze of marks. You get the sense of Rip trying to capture a fleeting impression; you can almost see him squinting out at the landscape, quickly moving his hand across the paper to try and capture what he sees. I love the roughness of the marks, the way the pencil lines build up in certain areas, becoming darker and denser, whilst others are left light and open. It’s the difference between just looking, and really *seeing* something. Look at the way the road disappears off into the distance, the pencil lines blurring out to almost nothing. It feels like a memory fading away. There's a similar feel to some of Mondrian’s early landscapes, before he got all grid-like. It's like Rip is saying something about memory and the ephemeral quality of experience.