Landscape with a River 1935

Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan made this energetic landscape drawing in charcoal, a medium that is easily smudged and reworked. Looking at the marks, I can imagine him grabbing a stick of charcoal and just letting loose. The composition feels restless, with scribbled lines creating a sense of movement and maybe even a little anxiety. See how the dark charcoal bunches and coagulates towards the top of the page, with that mass of vertical strokes almost like a threatening rain cloud. It makes me wonder what was going through his mind when he made this; what was the emotion he was trying to convey? But there is also something very delicate about the way he captures the textures of the landscape – the rough bark of a tree, the gentle ripples of the water. Kubínčan seems to be in conversation with other landscape artists like Van Gogh, who used expressive marks to convey emotional states, but this is all his own. It’s a deeply personal vision of the natural world and an opportunity for us to reflect on our own relationship to it.