Huizen aan een waterkant c. 1909s

Alexander Shilling made this drawing of houses on a waterfront with pencil on paper. It's all about mark-making here, those quick, scribbled lines building up shapes and textures. You can really feel the artist working through the scene, finding the forms as he goes. Look at the density of the graphite on the right-hand side, those dark, almost frantic marks describing the side of a building. It's like Shilling is wrestling with the subject, trying to capture its essence with a flurry of lines. Then, compare that to the left-hand side, where the marks are lighter, more sparse, suggesting a sense of reflection and distance. It makes me think of Constable’s cloud studies, how he used drawing to really look at the world. It's this constant conversation, artists responding to the world and each other across time. Shilling invites us to see the world through his eyes, with all its messy, beautiful ambiguity.