Abklatsch van de krijttekening op pagina 9 verso 1890 - 1931

Willem Bastiaan Tholen made this, ‘Abklatsch van de krijttekening op pagina 9 verso’, with chalk, but it's really more like a ghost of a chalk drawing! There is this beautiful blue-grey haze that hovers on the page, like mist. Looking at it, I can imagine the artist pressing the original drawing onto this page, almost like a printmaking process, or a transfer. The texture is what grabs me, the way the chalk has this soft, crumbly feel. I bet if you touched it, it would smudge right away. The colour reminds me of those old carbon copies, pale and mysterious. It makes me think of Cy Twombly's scribbled surfaces, the way he captured a sense of fleeting movement. But here, it's even more ephemeral, like a memory fading. Art isn't always about perfect execution, it is about embracing accidents, the in-between spaces, the half-there images that spark our imaginations.