Ontwerp voor een raam in het Noordertransept in de Dom te Utrecht c. 1878 - 1938

This is Richard Nicolaüs Roland Holst’s design for a window in the Dom at Utrecht, made with graphite, ink, and watercolor. The design feels both ancient and modern to me. There's a wonderful tension between the organic forms and the geometric structure. The artist uses bold outlines and blocks of color. It reminds me of stained glass, of course. The way the light would shine through those colors! I'm drawn to the figure in the center, caught in a moment of revelation or maybe despair. Holst's really working the push and pull between abstraction and representation. Look at how the shapes of the body resolve into abstraction. It's like he's showing us the gears turning, the process of seeing and making. I see echoes of Munch, maybe Hodler, that same search for spiritual meaning in a rapidly changing world. Ultimately, the drawing is about the act of seeing, of finding meaning in the chaos.