Ornament met overlappende cirkels c. 1901

Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof made this drawing called ‘Ornament met overlappende cirkels’ with pencil on paper. It's at the Rijksmuseum. Looking at the work, I imagine him carefully plotting each point, each intersection of lines, trying to find the hidden order, or maybe even creating it. I bet Dijsselhof was so methodical, sitting for hours, working through the problem. There’s something so human in this kind of obsessive mark-making, a search for harmony, and the way he has followed the lines of the paper, using them as a structure for the unfolding geometric pattern. It's like he's trying to crack a code, and maybe, in a way, he is. I wonder what the code is? Artists are in an ongoing conversation, and each mark builds on the last. It is a constant exchange of ideas across time, inspiring creativity.