Eekhoorn in een boom en een kangoeroe c. 1904 - 1906

Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof sketched "Squirrel in a tree and a Kangaroo" with pen and ink on paper at an unknown date. What grabs me is the minimal, almost childlike, quality of the drawing, yet the line is so confident! The paper is allowed to breathe. It becomes the sky, the ground, the atmosphere. The kangaroo is just an outline, but it's so full of potential energy, isn't it? And then, above, a more detailed squirrel, almost like a little crown. The contrast is so simple and yet so dynamic. There's a kind of playfulness that reminds me of Joan Miró, that same embrace of the accidental, the intuitive mark. It's like Dijsselhof is saying, "Here’s a world, unfinished, unpolished, but full of life.” And it's up to us to fill in the blanks. Because isn’t that what art is all about?