Kop van een vrouw met een hoed 1890 - 1946

Cornelis Vreedenburgh made this drawing of a woman's head with a hat at an unknown date, using graphite on paper. The thing that grabs me here is the visible process. You can see the graphite lines, they're immediate, a bit scratchy, and super confident. The artist is not trying to hide his workings, instead, they're embracing the act of seeing and recording. Look at how the lines describing the hat overlap and cluster together. It's almost sculptural, like he's building form with these little marks. And the paper itself, that off-white, slightly textured surface, becomes part of the drawing. It's not just a background, but an active participant. It reminds me a little of some of Giacometti's drawings, that same sense of searching and finding form through repetition. It’s all about ambiguity and possibility, not landing on one fixed image, but allowing for multiple readings.