Kinderorkest in een tuin 1912

Nelly Spoor made this drawing of a children’s orchestra in a garden using ink on paper. Look at the way she's built up the forms with these tiny, teeming marks, like she's almost knitting the scene together. You know, art making is often about this kind of layering, slowly coaxing the image into being. I’m really drawn to the energy in the marks that build the dog in the foreground, the way she uses line to create volume and texture, you can almost feel the fur. The ink isn’t overworked, it’s more about suggestion than precise representation. It feels fresh and immediate. There is a lovely tension between the scratchy informality of the drawing and the more formal, theatrical composition. The high viewpoint looks down on the players as if we are watching a stage. Spoor’s work reminds me of Paula Modersohn-Becker who was also interested in childhood, but unlike Modersohn-Becker, Spoor isn’t concerned with realism. Rather, it captures something fleeting and whimsical. Art is a conversation, isn't it, across time, across styles, and sometimes the most beautiful things are the ones that leave space for our imagination.