Ontwerp voor een schoorsteenmantel c. 1928

Carel Adolph Lion Cachet made this design for a mantelpiece with pencil on paper, so it’s a pretty immediate thing. Look how the lines wander and suggest forms. The artist is feeling around for how it all might come together. I always love this kind of sketching. You can see the mind at work, shifting ideas, making corrections and annotations. I am sure he was thinking about interior space, volume and functionality, maybe even the people who would gather there, or the fire that would burn inside it. The physicality of the piece is so clear. You can almost see the pressure of the pencil on the page, the quick, light strokes that build up the image. It’s like a conversation between the artist and the idea. It reminds me that artists are always in dialogue with each other, across time, riffing off ideas, pushing boundaries, and inspiring each other. This sketch, with its ambiguity and looseness, is an invitation to imagine, to dream, to participate in the ongoing evolution of art.