Het dorp 's-Gravezande

Aert Schouman made this watercolor drawing of 's-Gravezande. Notice the pale and washy quality, with fluid brushstrokes. The composition is dominated by horizontal bands of muted greens and blues. In the foreground, the land is flat, leading your eye to the steeple which punctuates the skyline. The painting’s structure shows an engagement with eighteenth-century notions of perspective, and a preoccupation with the picturesque. Schouman invites us to consider the relationship between the natural and the built. It’s a landscape, but one carefully ordered. A certain amount of control is exercised over the wildness of nature to suggest the presence of man, and to reflect an ordered universe. What do you make of how the artist uses the materiality of the watercolor? How might the flatness of the picture plane work to challenge fixed meanings and engage with new ways of thinking about space, perception, power, or representation?