Bomen 1872 - 1939

Egbert Rubertus Derk Schaap made this drawing of trees sometime in his life, using graphite on paper. There’s something so direct about drawing, isn’t there? It's like the most basic form of thinking out loud. Here, Schaap’s put down these trees with such an economy of means. Look at the layering of the graphite, how he’s built up the darks and lights with simple hatching. You can almost feel the pressure of his hand on the paper, the way he’s varied the strokes to suggest form and texture. See those few lines describing the bare branches reaching up? It’s like he’s caught the essence of the trees in winter, their starkness against the sky. It reminds me a bit of some of the early landscape sketches by Mondrian, before he went all-in on abstraction, where you can see him grappling with similar themes of nature and form. In both, there's this sense of an artist working through ideas, a process of reduction and simplification. Of course, Schaap is doing his own thing here, and, ultimately, that's what all art is, right? An ongoing conversation, a sharing of ways of seeing.