Liggende naakte vrouw 1906 - 1945

Reijer Stolk made this drawing of a reclining nude woman with crayon on paper, but when exactly, we don’t know. Stolk’s marks are restless, the strokes are dark and thick, clustered together to describe the form of the woman’s body. The tonal range is limited, the blank paper coming into play as highlight, but this only adds to the intimacy of the work. Look at the upper part of the woman’s torso. The artist's choice to mass the marks in that area creates a sense of drama. The marks have a real weight to them, it's not so much about the lines themselves, but the darkness that they form when put together. It's kind of beautiful how he finds the volume of the body through these marks. You see this same kind of mark-making in the work of Käthe Kollwitz, another artist who understood how much feeling you can put into a drawing. The result isn’t so much a picture of a nude, but a picture of a feeling.