Sketches after Nature 1932

Hans Bellmer made this pencil drawing, Sketches after Nature, and the interesting thing to me is the name: 'after nature'. It looks like boats at a harbour. The marks are tentative, exploratory, like Bellmer is feeling his way through the subject. They overlap and intersect, creating a sense of depth and space but, in a way, they are also quite flat. There is a really lovely passage of rope right there at the front, drawn with a care and attention which belies the other sketched elements of the background. The contrast makes the foreground almost sculptural. Bellmer's artistic concerns were so often about the human body, and this drawing feels like a moment of stepping aside from this. It reminds me a little of Guston, in that it is figurative but underpinned by abstraction, it invites us to look beyond the surface, to consider the act of drawing itself. It's more than just an image, it's a record of looking.