Landschap met boerderijen en een molen 1907

This landscape with farmhouses and a mill was dashed off by Willem Cornelis Rip using a graphite pencil. You can see how the pencil moves across the page, light and dark, searching for the forms in the landscape. I can imagine Rip outside somewhere, sketchbook in hand, capturing a quick impression of the scene. He's probably squinting a little, trying to simplify what he sees into lines and shapes. Look at the way he’s scribbled those trees, almost like a shorthand for foliage. You get a real sense of atmosphere and place despite it being such a fleeting sketch, don’t you think? It's like a painter’s note to self, and you get a sense of his process: observing, responding, and distilling. It makes you think about the tradition of landscape painting, all the artists who've stood in fields trying to capture something of the world around them. We stand on the shoulders of each other and these works inspire us!