School vissen c. 1901

Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof made this drawing of fish, seemingly at school, in a notebook with graphite. I love the scribbly, almost frantic energy of this sketch. The artist seems less interested in a perfect representation and more in capturing the feeling of movement, of a school of fish darting through water. Look at the upper left corner, the dark shading is almost abstract, but it gives a sense of depth and mystery. Then your eye is drawn to the quick, repetitive strokes that form the bodies of the fish. Dijsselhof isn't trying to hide the process here. You can see the individual marks, the way the graphite catches on the paper. It reminds me that art is really just a series of decisions, of marks and gestures, all adding up to something that hopefully communicates an idea or feeling. You can almost hear the scratching of the graphite on the page, right? There is something very Japanese in the way that he lets the paper ground show through. Think of Hokusai. Art is just an ongoing conversation across time.