Kalenderblad november met bloemen, before 1904

This is Anna Sipkema’s calendar sheet for the month of November, probably made as a print, with graphic lines and a palette of olive green, yellow, and violet. The very act of marking and designing such a thing must have been a shifting, emerging process of trial and error! I sympathize with Anna, imagining her at work, maybe thinking about the leaves turning brown, or the days getting shorter. There’s a real physicality to these colors and shapes – the gentle green acts as a grounding for the decorative yellow and playful violet, setting up a lovely dialogue with the gridded calendar itself. Look how the artist uses line to build up the central flower shapes, and how each leaf form is different from the next. Sipkema’s overall body of work, and the work of other painters, reveals how artists are in an ongoing conversation, exchanging ideas across time. Painting is a form of expression that embraces ambiguity, and that allows for multiple interpretations, never one fixed meaning.