Man zittend op een kar op een straat 1890 - 1946

This graphite drawing by Cornelis Vreedenburgh captures a man seated on a cart in a street; you can almost feel the sun baking down on the road. The image is made up of lots of tentative lines, and it feels like Vreedenburgh is coaxing the scene into being, rubbing at the paper, trying to get the essence of the guy on the cart. I wonder if it was a hot day, and he felt like he had to capture the scene quickly before the light shifted too much. There’s a beautiful looseness to the whole thing – you can see the marks where he’s felt his way around the forms. Look at the buildings in the background: they're a web of lines, not quite solid, but somehow capturing the weight of the architecture. The street itself is a blur, dissolving into the white of the paper, suggesting the heat haze. I love the way artists like Vreedenburgh figure things out on paper, it’s like eavesdropping on their thought processes and artistic gestures. It reminds me of the drawings of Van Gogh, which share the same sort of energy. Artists are always looking at each other, aren't they?