Annotaties Possibly 1907 - 1911

Here we have a page from George Hendrik Breitner’s notebook, and it looks like it was made with ink on paper. The thing about sketchbooks is that you get to see what other artists are looking at, and thinking about. I mean, I wonder what was going through Breitner’s head as he scribbled these annotations? It's hard to know what these refer to, but for me, there’s something so intimate about seeing an artist’s raw thoughts, unfiltered and unedited. The physical act of writing, the pressure of the pen on the page, the way the ink bleeds slightly into the fibers – it all tells a story. There’s a kind of energy in these marks that I totally relate to as a painter. It’s like a map of the artist's mind, each stroke a little piece of their process. We all borrow and steal and riff off each other, and that's the beauty of art – it's an ongoing conversation, a constant exchange of ideas across time.