Bandontwerp voor: Charles M. van Deventer, Hollandsche bellettrie van den dag, 1901 1901

This is a design for a book cover from 1901 by Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries, made with graphite and possibly some blue ink on paper. It's not the finished cover, but a preliminary sketch. What I love is how the artist is working out the geometry, we can see the grid structure, that they're not afraid to expose the underlying structure. It’s like they're showing us how they think, how they build up the image, step by step. The diamond shape in the corner is like a window into a different world, a world of letters and stories, but it's still just a sketch, a suggestion. That blue is really interesting, it almost feels like a correction, like the artist changed their mind. It's that kind of layering, that kind of visible decision-making, that I find so exciting in art. Think of Hilma af Klint's preparatory drawings, they share that sense of open-ended exploration. For me, art is not about perfection, but about process.