Decoratieve weefpatronen c. 1916 - 1945

Reijer Stolk made these decorative weaving patterns sometime before 1945, using graphite on paper. Look at the way these marks have been worked, rubbed, and repeated. You can almost feel the artist at work, lost in thought, trying to imagine ways to interweave the lines. The textures created by the crisscrossing marks show how the artist considered the possibilities of weaving as a design principle. The light grey lines across the paper intersect and create a beautiful tonal register, like notes on a musical scale. What I love about these sketches is that they give us a sense of the artist’s intimate process, a kind of generative thinking through drawing. We see Stolk’s process of making something, from nothing, into something. And that something—an idea—is passed onto us. We too can be stimulated to weave new ideas! Because this is what artists do: they play and exchange ideas through time and space.