Abklatsch van de potloodtekening op pagina 24 c. 1910 - 1915

Willem Witsen made this pencil transfer drawing, "Abklatsch van de potloodtekening op pagina 24," using graphite on paper, with one image bleeding onto the other. The beauty of this piece lies in its ephemerality. Look how the initial drawing on the left smudges and fades as it gets transferred on the right! I can imagine Witsen, carefully pressing the two pages together, curious about the ghost image he’s about to create. It reminds me that every mark, every action in art-making, leaves a trace and has the potential for unexpected outcomes. What was on his mind, I wonder? A landscape? A figure? The process of transfer itself becomes a metaphor for memory, for the way images linger and transform over time. This reminds me of Rauschenberg’s printmaking and how he embraced chance and accident. With each print, something slightly different happened, and the artist had to be flexible enough to incorporate those changes into the final work. It’s a reminder that art-making is about embracing the unexpected, engaging in a conversation with the medium itself.