Wolken 1910

This is a quick pencil sketch of clouds, made by George Hendrik Breitner, and kept at the Rijksmuseum. The light touch and simple lines of this sketch are what first caught my eye; it is art stripped back to its essence. Looking closely, you can see the texture of the paper coming through, a rough surface for equally rough marks. See how Breitner captures the movement of clouds with the bare minimum of line? It feels like he’s trying to catch something fleeting, to pin down the shape before it shifts and vanishes. The base of the page is ripped, and some notes scrawled along the bottom. This gives a sense of the working process, the mundane reality of artmaking. Breitner was part of the Amsterdam Impressionism movement, and you can see the same concern with light and atmosphere in his paintings. Artists like Constable also tried to capture the sky, but there is something particularly fresh about this sketch. It reminds us that even a few simple marks can convey a whole world of feeling.