Landschap met struik 1872 - 1939

Egbert Rubertus Derk Schaap made this small landscape drawing with graphite, and you can almost feel him working en plein air. I can imagine Schaap outside, wrestling with the breeze and trying to capture the essence of the landscape, its light and mood. He’s making marks, erasures, adjustments, building up the image bit by bit. I see him layering the graphite to create a sense of depth and texture; a dense scribble suggests the foliage, while sharp lines define the bare branches of the bush. The overall effect is of a fleeting moment captured, a whispered conversation between the artist and nature. The way he’s used the graphite—smudging, hatching, and cross-hatching—really sings to me. It reminds me of the gestural drawings of Van Gogh, or even the later works of Twombly. Ultimately, it makes me think about how, as artists, we're all in dialogue with each other across time, trying to translate the world into marks on a surface. Painting, drawing—it’s all about embracing ambiguity and letting the marks speak for themselves, right?