Gezicht op de kust bij St. Andrews te Canada 1915

Willem Witsen made this sketch of the coast near St. Andrews, Canada, using graphite on paper, and it feels like he’s thinking through seeing. The way the pencil lines build up, especially on the left, gives this feeling of a solid, rocky place, but then it sort of dissolves into a hazy nothing on the right. It’s almost like memory or like looking into the future – the left is what you know, and the right is what could be. I like the open quality, the way the white of the paper breathes through the marks. You can really see the hand of the artist here, the thinking, feeling hand. It’s like he’s saying, “Here’s what I see, but it’s also just marks on a page.” Think of it as a conversation with someone like Whistler. He's another artist who was really interested in how to capture a mood with just a few strokes. Art is about exploration, not about making things that are too sure of themselves.