Ornament met rolwerk c. 1901

This is Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof's "Ornament met rolwerk," made with a pencil on paper, and although we don't know the exact date, it resonates with art from around 1900. Dijsselhof's mark-making feels so immediate. The thick, soft lines of the graphite give the image a real sense of weight, but there's also this lightness, this quickness, in the way the lines are laid down. You can almost see him circling the spiral at the top. It’s a sketch, a study, and that’s part of its charm. I always like seeing the bones of a picture. I keep coming back to that spiral at the top of the drawing. It’s so controlled, so tight, but then the lines below just kind of spill out, they loosen up, as if gravity took over. It reminds me of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings; you can see the same preoccupation with line and form, the same push and pull between decoration and representation. Art's a conversation, right? Dijsselhof seems to be joining in. It is more about process than it is about final outcomes.