Koe en koeienkop 1891 - 1941

Leo Gestel made this small drawing, Koe en koeienkop, with black chalk on paper. You can see how he’s really feeling his way into the subject, as if trying to find the cows hiding in the blank space of the paper. The lines are tentative, searching, and sometimes they double back on themselves. Look at the rear cow, how the charcoal is smudged in to create that shadowy mass on its back. Gestel really captures the bulk and weight of the animal with these simple marks. Then there’s the head, isolated on the left. The single open eye seems to suggest both the presence and the absence of the animal. Gestel was part of a generation of artists who were absorbing all the radical developments of early modernism, so you can see echoes of expressionism and cubism in his work. But in the end, he made it his own, and in this simple drawing, he created something really special. It shows artmaking as a process. It is like a conversation between the artist and the subject.