La "Treille Muscate," la maison de Colette 1929 - 1932

This is André Dunoyer de Segonzac’s sketch of Colette’s house, made with ink, probably with a fine nibbed pen, and what a lovely way to memorialize a place. The artist seems to suggest a landscape, but it’s really all about line: hatched, cross-hatched, scratched, and scribbled. The artist is thinking through line, making a mark, and then another mark, and then another, and we get to see how a feeling of space and texture is constructed. Look at the way he renders the foliage in the foreground, these thorny branches that look like they might snag your sweater. The density of the marks really conveys that feeling of prickly, overgrown nature. And then the sky is just a few, sparse, horizontal lines. It makes me think about the way an artist like Van Gogh used to use line to sculpt form; Segonzac does something similar, but the result is much more airy and immediate. It’s like a quick, intimate conversation with a place. Art is just one big conversation, isn't it?