Bandontwerp voor: Nannie van Wehl, Huize Labor, 1910 before 1910

Willem Pothast designed this band for Nannie van Wehl’s *Huize Labor* with pencil and ink around 1910. I love the thinness of the lines, so delicate and almost tentative, like a spider web spun on the page. Look closely and you can see the artist’s hand at work in the slight variations in line weight, the occasional tremor or skip in the ink. It’s like you can feel Pothast’s presence, hovering over the drawing as he coaxes it into being. This is never more apparent than in the girl’s dress, the parallel lines somehow both descriptive and suggestive. This attention to the material aspects of the work allows the image to breathe, and embraces the imperfect and the unfinished. It’s easy to imagine Aubrey Beardsley looking at this and smiling. Pothast seems to say that art is a process of exploration, a journey of discovery rather than a quest for perfection.