Gezichten van twee mannen c. 1916 - 1945

Reijer Stolk made this pencil drawing of two men, called "Gezichten van twee mannen", sometime before 1945. I love how immediate this drawing is. The artist must have worked fast, capturing these profiles with a quick, searching line. You can almost feel the scratch of the pencil on the page. I wonder, was Stolk trying to understand something about these men? Were they friends, strangers, or figments of his imagination? It's kind of great how the lines overlap and intersect, creating a sense of depth and movement, almost like they are ghosts of each other. Even the hatched lines on the right start talking to the faces. It reminds me that artists are always in conversation, echoing and riffing off each other's ideas. Each line is an experiment, a question, a way of seeing the world anew.