Ontwerp voor de Tweede Bossche Wand: visoen van Johannes op Patmos c. 1869 - 1925

Curator: We’re looking at "Ontwerp voor de Tweede Bossche Wand: visoen van Johannes op Patmos", a design, likely from between 1869 and 1925, by Antoon Derkinderen. It employs ink, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper. Editor: Oh, this is interesting. There's a distinct sense of serenity… yet also an almost dizzying geometry in the top portion. It feels somehow... unfinished but incredibly deliberate in its planning. Curator: Deliberate is key. This is, as the title suggests, a design for a mural, a section of what would have been a much larger narrative cycle. Consider the careful layering of ink, watercolor, and coloured pencil. Editor: So, a material investigation of the visionary process. Derkinderen isn't just depicting a vision, he's architecting it through his selection of humble tools. It makes you wonder what those coats of arms that look to be in a sketch state might symbolize to the commissioner. Were the geometric choices imposed? Curator: Good point. The interplay of geometric forms with the organic—the figure of John, the eagles, the suggestion of a landscape—creates a dynamic tension. There's that circular mandorla that recalls the medieval illuminated manuscripts of biblical narratives, yet rendered with a certain modernistic clarity. Editor: And all of this, the deliberate archaism mingled with the modern, rendered in decidedly ordinary materials... almost defiant in a way. There’s nothing intrinsically “precious” about colored pencil or paper. He’s democratizing the very act of envisioning the sacred. It's a fascinating study in how something becomes art. Curator: Precisely. By exploring Derkinderen’s draft, it reminds me of how a sketch can often carry a powerful vision of its own, perhaps more potent because its execution contains the possibility of the image still becoming. Editor: Absolutely, and I am more convinced of its deliberate construction. It reminds us that materials and process are just as important as content in this kind of historic religious representation, if not more.