Aangemeerde boten bij een kade 1890 - 1946

Cornelis Vreedenburgh made this sketch of boats docked by a quay using graphite on paper. You can see the hand moving across the page, trying to capture this image. I’m always interested in the way an artist makes these kinds of decisions on the fly. He’s trying to capture the basic lay of the land, deciding what to include and what to leave out. You can see the traces of buildings and the masts of ships. There are even a couple of little birds! What was it like to sit there and look at all those boats and buildings? How do you reduce that to just a few lines? I can feel him weighing up what's important, and trying to make quick marks to get it all down. We can all learn from this kind of approach, remembering that the goal of art is not to make perfect images, but to engage in a dialogue with the world around us. And in the process, we find new ways of seeing and thinking about things.