Boerderij met rieten kap 1907

Alexander Shilling sketched this thatched farmhouse with a soft pencil, or maybe charcoal. It's all about mark-making as a process, not just depicting a scene. The texture is everything here. Look at the roof; it's a dense collection of tiny, energetic lines, creating a tactile sense of the rough, organic material. The light isn't rendered with careful shading, but through the density and direction of the marks. See how the strokes follow the form, giving the roof its volume? Then notice the hatch marks under the roof that create small rectangles, representing windows or bricks. It's almost like Shilling is constructing the building with the marks themselves. This reminds me of Van Gogh's drawings, that same urgency and love of line, turning the mundane into something vibrating with life. Art is a conversation, right? Each mark is a thought, a feeling, an echo of all the marks that came before.