Spelend en lezend meisje en een jongen met een opgeheven arm c. 1928

Otto Verhagen made this sketch of playing and reading figures with what looks like a graphite stick, capturing daily life with minimal fuss. What I like is how loose everything is, like quick notes jotted down on the go. There’s a raw, immediate quality to the marks, a real sense of the artist capturing fleeting moments. The texture of the paper shows through, grounding the images in the physical world, like we are looking at the page of a sketchbook. Look at the figure with the raised arm: see how the jacket is all angles and slashes, while the face has only a few lines? It’s about getting the essence of the gesture down, not fussing over details. This reminds me of other artists like David Hockney. The kind of quick studies that end up being artworks in their own right. It's not precious, more like a playful embrace of seeing. It reminds us that art is always in conversation, a back-and-forth between artists and the world around them.