Landschap met een wolkenlucht 1906

George Hendrik Breitner made this drawing, *Landschap met een wolkenlucht,* a landscape with a cloudy sky, with graphite on paper. Look at those marks! You can see Breitner trying to get the cloud right. You can see the ghost of earlier clouds that didn’t make the cut; the pressure of the graphite changes as he finds the shapes he wants. He’s working fast, trying to capture something ephemeral, the light, the movement. I know that feeling, trying to wrestle something onto the page before it disappears! It’s kind of interesting to think about landscape drawing at this time, when photography was becoming more common. What does it mean to choose to draw a landscape when you could just photograph it? What does the act of drawing bring to seeing? It makes it so the thing you are drawing goes through you. Painters are always in conversation with each other, trying to figure out how to see and how to translate that vision into something tangible.