Landschap met een huis en molen

Willem Cornelis Rip made this landscape with a house and mill using graphite on paper. It looks like he was working fast, trying to capture a feeling, or a memory. It is almost as if the artist is thinking aloud as he is drawing, the graphite softly scumbled across the page as if he is trying to evoke a sense of depth and texture with the marks. The layered strokes build a quiet intensity, the house and the mill almost fade into the rest of the landscape. There is a beautiful ambiguity to the work. You can see the influence of the Hague School artists in the subdued palette. Like Mondrian, who began in the Hague School, Rip’s work has a feeling of nature being distilled to its essence. The directness of the marks and the ephemeral quality of the landscape feels like an intimate conversation.