Steigerende paarden in een wei met bloemen 1891 - 1941

Leo Gestel made this drawing of rearing horses in a meadow of flowers with pencil on paper. I love the immediacy of a sketch like this; it’s all about the artist's hand moving across the page. You can see the energy in those quick, confident lines that define the horses' forms, and the playful way he suggests the flowers below. It's like you’re witnessing the thought process right there on the page. The texture of the paper peeks through the graphite, giving the whole thing a kind of breathy lightness. Look at the horse in the foreground, how the lines seem to dance around its body. Those marks don’t just describe a shape, they give it life, a sense of movement and tension. You can almost hear the horses snorting and pawing the ground. It reminds me a little of Franz Marc's drawings. But while Marc was interested in expressing the animal's inner spirit, Gestel seems more interested in the sheer joy of drawing, of capturing the essence of a moment. Art, at its best, embraces these kinds of ambiguities.