Gezicht op huizen en begroeiing in Buitenzorg c. 1921

Willem Witsen made this ‘View of Houses and Vegetation in Buitenzorg’ with etching. The whole image is built from tiny marks, the kind you get when you are thinking and looking at the same time. It feels like an all-over composition in the way that the marks don’t stop in any one area; they just keep going to the edge. Look at the way the darker areas are built up, almost like a Pollock, with a density of interwoven lines. The lightest areas, on the other hand, seem to be created by a kind of erasure, so that the whole image feels built, then unbuilt, in a continuous process. Witsen is known as a Dutch Impressionist, and you might also see a similarity to the drawings of Van Gogh, or even some of the early twentieth-century Fauvist painters. The image is all about an artistic exchange between people and places.