Gezicht op de Nieuwe Kerk te Amsterdam Possibly 1907 - 1911

George Hendrik Breitner made this sketch of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, but when I look at it, I can't help but feel like I'm looking at a painting by Philip Guston. The energetic lines dive across the page, building the rough outline of a recognizable scene, but never committing to a complete picture. It’s like he's thinking out loud, letting the pencil run free, and letting us eavesdrop on his thought process. You can almost feel the graphite on the page, can’t you? Look at the bottom left corner, at the thick strokes suggesting shadow, they give the whole image weight, pinning it down. Like Guston, Breitner seems to be interested in the act of seeing as much as the thing being seen. He is not concerned with precision or detail, but with capturing the feeling of a place, and the energy of a moment. The beauty of this piece is its incompleteness. It embraces the messy, the unresolved, the ambiguous.