Kerk aan een weg 1890 - 1946

Cornelis Vreedenburgh made this sketch of a church on a road with graphite on paper. It’s all about the bones of the building, isn’t it? I love the way the texture of the building is conveyed through layers of hatching. See how the marks are built up, one on top of the other. This isn’t a finished picture, but it’s a kind of thinking out loud, where the artist allows us to see his process. The surface of the drawing, with its smudges and erasures, is as important as the lines that define the church. It’s like the artist is feeling his way through the form, one mark at a time. Look at the upper part of the building, there’s a section where the shading is particularly dense. It’s almost as if the artist is trying to find the weight of the structure, grounding it in the space of the page. Vreedenburgh reminds me a bit of Morandi, the way he reduces things down to their essence, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Art isn’t about answers. It’s about questions.