Studie, mogelijk van een landschap Possibly 1920 - 1924

Willem Witsen made this study, possibly of a landscape, sometime between 1860 and 1923, with a pencil, in the Netherlands. Look at this single, searching line, meandering up the page. It makes me think about the tentative dance between seeing and describing. Has Witsen found his subject, or is he still looking? I imagine him outside somewhere, squinting in the Dutch light. Perhaps he was trying to define an elusive horizon line in a quick sketch. There's so much open space on the page. It makes me think about how sometimes what isn't there matters as much as what is. How can you capture the vastness of a landscape with one thin line? It's like a challenge the artist has set for himself. I suppose all artists face similar problems in different ways. We make marks, change them, erase them, and keep trying to find something meaningful in the process.