Studieblad met mannenhoofden c. 1903

George Hendrik Breitner made this sketch on paper, and you can see it there in front of you. It's an intimate encounter. The page is filled with tentative lines, quickly searching out the planes of the face, the tilt of the head. I imagine Breitner in a cafe, quickly capturing the people around him, trying to understand what it is to be human. I'm always moved by an artist's desire to understand the world around them through drawing, through the hand, through observation. The soft graphite captures the likeness of his subject, but it also reveals the artist’s thinking and the materiality of the sketch. I'm a painter, so I like to think about drawing as a conversation with other artists across time. I’m interested in how each artist can inspire the other’s creativity, in an ongoing exchange of ideas and marks. It shows how painting is a form of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.