Ontwerp voor een hangende lamp 1874 - 1932

This is Mathieu Lauweriks' "Ontwerp voor een hangende lamp", a design for a hanging lamp, created sometime between 1880 and 1930 using pencil and red pencil. It's fascinating how Lauweriks teases out this complex, spiraling form with such simple means! Look at the paper, you can see how the materials themselves—the tooth of the paper, the give of the pencil—become part of the conversation. You can see the texture in the weave of the paper and the smudging of the pencil, revealing the process, a kind of back-and-forth between intention and accident. The red pencil adds a layer of precision to the organic quality of the graphite. My eye keeps returning to the top left corner, where a few sections of the design are filled in, as if the artist is testing out the visual weight of the completed object. There's an unfinished quality here, a sense of potential, that reminds me a little of Hilma af Klint's diagrams. It's like looking into the artist's mind, seeing how an idea takes shape through geometry. Ultimately, it reminds us that art is a process of discovery, a conversation between the artist, the materials, and the idea itself.