Le dessin de Mackintosh de la 'House for an art lover' 1901

This drawing of the 'House for an art lover' was made by Charles Rennie Mackintosh using ink on paper. Look at the marks, so many tiny little dashes creating a full image! For me, artmaking is a process of building something up, bit by bit, finding the bigger picture in the detail. There's a real contrast here in the texture, between the solid white block of the house and the scribbled dark sky. The architecture itself is so clean, angular, with these funny little rows of windows. And then, a frenzy of marks surrounding it! My eye is drawn to the fence, scratchy and urgent. It looks almost like the house is caged, or maybe protected, by these wild marks. This tension between order and chaos reminds me a little bit of Mondrian, especially his earlier landscapes. Like Mackintosh, he was interested in the relationship between the geometric and the organic. But ultimately, with art, it’s okay to disagree, to not have a fixed idea, because art is alive, changing, and multiple.