Studies van een meisje met hoed

Isaac Israels made this drawing, ‘Studies van een meisje met hoed’, and it’s now held at the Rijksmuseum. It’s all about process. Israels is feeling out the shapes, mapping the subject, searching for some kind of truth. The thing that grabs me are the marks, like the shadow on the figure to the left, which is dense and smudgy. I can imagine the artist using his finger to rub the charcoal into the page. There are more delicate, skeletal marks everywhere else, which hover like ghosts of the subject, or maybe failed attempts at capturing her likeness. There's a feeling of incompleteness, as if the drawing is in constant flux. I think of artists like Daumier, who also captured everyday life with a similar quickness and sensitivity. It’s like they were both grabbing at something fleeting. The magic is in the in-between spaces, the unresolved, messy parts. That's where the real stuff lives.