Bosgezicht 1884 - 1927

Johan Antonie de Jonge made this pencil drawing, Bosgezicht, at an unknown date. Looking at the sky, made with tightly hatched marks, I can tell De Jonge was really feeling the pressure of that pencil on the page. There’s an energy in the way the tones of the sky get so dark, but then fade into lighter strokes towards the ground. And check out those trees! They’re not just standing there; they're practically dancing with all their scratchy, scribbled lines. I love how you can see the artist working and reworking his marks. Take for example, the way he suggests texture in the foliage in the middle-ground, a real push-pull between suggesting form and simply letting the marks sit on the page. This reminds me of the landscape drawings of Van Gogh, full of a similar kind of restless energy. Ultimately, what I get from this work is a sense of how every mark carries its own weight, its own story of how it came to be.