Landschap met bomen en hooibalen 1913 - 1918

Alexander Shilling’s landscape is rendered in pencil, a process of touch, pressure, and movement across the page. See how the marks build up like a thicket of tiny lines, giving the trees their volume and texture. The layered strokes feel like the artist is feeling his way through the scene, building it up piece by piece. Notice how the pencil work varies in tone and direction, creating a sense of depth. The sky is a mass of horizontal lines, while the trees are rendered with shorter, more chaotic strokes, and the tree trunks are more simple vertical lines. It's a bit like Cezanne’s watercolors, how he worked in layers of transparent color to build up a sense of form and space. With Shilling you can see the ghost of Corot, whose landscapes are all about capturing the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. Both approaches embrace the open-endedness of art, its capacity to hold multiple perspectives and possibilities at once.