Boerderijen 1907

This is a pencil drawing of some farmhouses by Alexander Shilling, made at an unknown date. There’s a freedom to the hand that I really admire: it makes me want to grab a pencil and sketch outside. It’s like Shilling is right there in front of them, trying to get every detail down on paper. You can see him figuring things out as he goes, the lines shifting and changing as he studies the shapes and shadows of the buildings. I imagine him standing there, maybe with the sun in his eyes, squinting as he looks at the buildings, trying to capture the way the light hits the roofs and walls. It feels like he’s trying to capture not just what the buildings look like, but how it feels to be there, standing in front of them. And then he might be thinking about other painters. The process of looking and sketching is an act of participating in a conversation with others. It gives me a sense of continuity, that the artist is not so much discovering something new but participating in something ancient.