Studieblad met een teen en annotaties c. 1915 - 1920

Curator: This is a fascinating study sheet by Willem Witsen, created sometime between 1915 and 1920. You can find it here at the Rijksmuseum. It's rendered in pencil on paper and titled "Studieblad met een teen en annotaties" - Study Sheet with a Toe and Annotations. Editor: My first impression is… fleeting. Like a thought half-formed. The smudged quality and scribbled notes make it seem like a glimpse into Witsen's creative process. A messy, honest peek behind the curtain. Curator: Exactly. Look at the variety of marks. The delicate shading used to define the toe contrasts sharply with the hasty scribbles of text scattered around the page. There’s an intimacy here, a sense of the artist wrestling with an idea, jotting down observations as they come. It is more a capture of mental material. Editor: You’re right. The focus on a single toe seems almost comical, and a tad grotesque. Like he was perhaps obsessing over it and needed to work it out by committing it to the page through observation. What does it tell us about the tools available to the artist, too? Here, simple graphite on paper becomes the method, immediate and accessible. Were other resources unavailable? Curator: Possibly. It might speak to a specific constraint but that also raises the larger conversation on value of simple tools to document our observations, especially when translated into figurative works. He wasn't seeking perfection; rather, he was likely trying to understand form, light, and shadow, breaking the anatomy to find an expressive element. Editor: Absolutely, there’s something appealing about that lack of pretension. High art is always talked about as existing on some pedestal; a piece like this, revealing the raw mechanics of making, exposes the entire industry of the fine arts by showing the importance of observation through a menial part of our anatomy. Curator: This toe is unexpectedly revealing, in its humanity. It seems so much more personable by capturing it mid-thought. Editor: Seeing the human hand and a random toe puts this piece somewhere entirely new in my view. I see the human making these works and not some genius far removed from me in time and accomplishment.