Vliegtuigen c. 1916

Reijer Stolk made this drawing, Vliegtuigen, we don't know exactly when, but it's there on paper, with a pencil. It's all about the line, a playful exploration of form. Stolk is not trying to trick us into seeing the world as it is, but as a possibility, an open sketch. The planes are captured with such immediacy, like a thought barely put down, but there they are, hovering. The repeated forms create a kind of rhythm, a visual echo that bounces across the surface. Each line feels tentative, searching, like Stolk is thinking through the image as he makes it. Look at the hatch marks and scribbles that imply shadow. They aren’t quite right, but do they need to be? It's not about perfection, but about the energy of the hand, the movement of the mind. I think of Cy Twombly when I see this, another artist who embraced the sketch, the fragment, the unfinished thought, as a valid form. There's a beauty in that incompleteness, a freedom that invites us to participate, to fill in the blanks, to imagine the rest.