Landschap, mogelijk een duinlandschap 1881 - 1927

Johan Antonie de Jonge made this drawing, a landscape, maybe of dunes, using what looks like graphite, and it's all about the energy of mark-making. The surface is alive with the scratchy, urgent quality of the marks, they're not really descriptive, but they evoke the feeling of the wind, and the scrubby, almost aggressive texture of dune grass. Look how the marks bunch together and then dissipate, it's like he’s mapping a feeling more than a place. There's this tension between the weight of the graphite and the lightness of the paper, which keeps your eye moving. It reminds me of some of Guston's looser drawings, where the subject is almost secondary to the act of drawing itself. De Jonge really gets at something essential about landscape, not its appearance, but its ever-changing nature.