Zittende naakte figuur naast een vaas met bloemen c. 1916

Reijer Stolk made this drawing of a seated nude figure next to a vase of flowers with crayon. Look at how he’s built the figure and the background with these hatched marks. I can imagine Stolk in his studio, working and reworking, trying to find the right form with these parallel strokes of brown, red, blue, and green. It must have been a process of searching and feeling his way through the subject. There’s something very intimate and vulnerable in the way the figure is rendered, almost childlike in its simplicity, like how a child might pick up a crayon and try to capture what they see around them. And there is also a dialogue with Matisse in the air – I'm thinking of the odalisques and the still lives, but without that decorative quality. It's like a dance, this conversation between artists across time, each one picking up the thread from the other, finding their own way of seeing and feeling the world.