Studieblad met olifanten en een huis after 1903

This drawing on paper, titled "Studieblad met olifanten en een huis," was created by Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof. Look at how Dijsselhof puts his pencil to paper, with a line that's clear, but not too precious, confident but also kind of wonky. The top half is like a little lesson in animal form, maybe from a children's book. The elephant, so gently rendered, is almost floating, while the bear has a determined, forward-leaning posture. But the bottom half is where things get interesting. There are some lighter, sketchier marks, especially in the bottom right, where a building is conjured from a mass of short, sharp lines. Dijsselhof's work reminds me a little of Marsden Hartley, both artists interested in the expressive possibilities of simple, direct mark-making. But where Hartley often aims for monumentality, Dijsselhof seems to embrace the casual, the intimate, like a page torn from a sketchbook, full of possibilities.