Zeegezicht nabij Ajaccio before 1903

Philipp von Schoeller created this landscape near Ajaccio, Corsica, at an unknown date, probably with ink or charcoal on paper. It’s all about the gradations of tone, how dark becomes light and back again – a real study in the push and pull of values. The texture is what gets me, though. It’s reproduced here in this book, so it’s flat. But I can imagine the grain of the paper, and how the medium must have responded to it. If you look closely at the horizon line, you can see the artist has laid down the tone with these little hatched marks, almost like he’s scribbling, quickly building up the density of the dark areas. They could be read as rain. It reminds me a little of the drawings of Cy Twombly, and how he built up tone with lots of scribbled marks. But of course this is landscape, whereas Twombly was much more abstract. Maybe he looked at these kinds of images and abstracted them? Who knows? Art is just one big conversation anyway.