Drie paarden en een koetsier 1875 - 1934

Isaac Israels made this drawing of three horses and a coachman with graphite on paper. The marks are jumbled, dark, and concentrated on the left, and they fade to the right. The lines give us an image that's more like a phantom than a portrait. I wonder what it was like for Israels to make this drawing. Was he in a carriage himself, or was he standing on the street? Was he in a hurry? I can imagine him making it, trying to catch the horses as they passed, to fix them on the page with short, scrabbly lines. I feel like I'm in the presence of movement, not stillness, and I know, as a painter myself, that there are accidents and errors involved in getting it down. But it's through those very accidents that you start to see something. I suppose all of us artists are in an ongoing conversation, inspiring each other's creativity, reaching across time. There's so much room for ambiguity here. We're left with uncertainty, but also possibility.