Molenaar met open deur en een architectuurstudie 1906 - 1907

Willem Witsen made this drawing with a pencil, and the thing about pencil is, it's so immediate, right? You can just pick it up and go. The artist is working out a composition, maybe for a painting, and it’s like he's thinking through the pencil. I imagine him rapidly sketching, blocking in shapes, finding the figures, losing them, and finding them again. Look at those marks, they're all energy, barely tethered to the subject. It’s like he’s trying to get the whole thing down before it disappears. I’m curious about the combination of the mill with the architectural study, placed together on the page. It’s like two different worlds colliding – the practical, working world of the miller, with the more cerebral world of architecture. Witsen is playing with contrasting forms and maybe even contrasting ideas. Painting is such an embodied practice that it makes sense that he’d explore these relationships on paper first, feeling his way through the darks and lights. It’s an ongoing conversation all artists have, with each other, and with themselves.