Landschap 1881 - 1927

Johan Antonie de Jonge made this landscape with graphite on paper and you can almost see him out there, squinting. I feel like I’m watching him draw, the graphite stick moving so quickly. I know that feeling when my hand is just trying to catch up with my eye. It's like he's trying to remember something that’s about to disappear, a moment in time. The scribbly parts feel so alive, like he was really in the thick of it, maybe battling the wind or trying to capture a fleeting light. Then there are these almost empty spaces, the sky perhaps, or a distant field, where the marks fade almost to nothing. That to me is a feeling of being there. I see the tradition of landscape painting in this, of course, but it feels so private and intimate, like a secret shared between the artist and the world. We can feel his energy in the pressure of the marks. Painters are always looking at other painters, in dialogue across time. It’s like we’re all just trying to figure out what it means to be here, to see, to feel. We are using marks to remember.