Strandgezicht met de zee c. 1901 - 1927

Johan Antonie de Jonge made this landscape with pencil on paper, probably en plein air, right there on the beach. I can imagine de Jonge with his pad, squinting, trying to capture the way the light just skates across the water. See how he’s layered those horizontal lines to give us a sense of the vastness of the sea? There’s this real economy of means, but he manages to evoke the feeling of standing on the shore, feeling the breeze, hearing the waves. It reminds me of some of Constable’s cloud studies. Artists, they're always looking, learning from each other, riffing on what’s come before. And I think that's the beauty of painting, or drawing. It's not about perfection, it's about the exchange, the conversation between the artist and the world. It's about trying to capture something fleeting, something felt. It’s about the looking and the making.