Composition (The Cow) 1917

Theo van Doesburg made this drawing of a cow at some point, using what looks like pencil on paper. It’s at MoMA now. The cool thing about a drawing like this is that you can almost feel the artist figuring things out, line by line. Looking at the surface, the marks are raw and kind of scratchy, not trying to hide the process at all. See how the lines build up the form, like a puzzle being pieced together? It's all about angles and planes, stripping the cow down to its bare bones, or should I say, bare lines. Those clusters of dark marks where the legs are? They give the whole thing a center of gravity. It reminds me a bit of some of the early Cubist drawings. A drawing like this is not about perfection; it’s about the joy of seeing and the struggle to represent it.