Venster met een staande figuur 1900 - 1903

Antoon Derkinderen made this drawing, ‘Venster met een staande figuur’, using what looks like graphite on paper. It’s really like a notebook page or a sketch—a flurry of thoughts captured in lines. There's a sketched figure beside columns of text. These notations and lines are not labored over, but feel immediate and instinctive. The window frame, rendered with simple lines and a string of circles, is almost childlike in its execution. The hand-written text dominates the composition and gives the piece a sense of energy. Look at the way the lines are drawn—some are firm, others are tentative, almost like the artist is thinking aloud on paper. This drawing reminds me of Cy Twombly's work—the way he layered text and image and created a kind of visual poetry. There is a similar kind of freedom, and ambiguity at play here, a sense that the drawing is a space for exploration.