Landschap met een molen 1901 - 1907

This landscape with a mill was drawn by Willem Witsen, and it's currently at the Rijksmuseum. The drawing is all about tone, mood, and atmosphere. You can almost feel the wind moving through the scene. What I love is that Willem isn’t trying to give us a perfect picture of the world; instead, he's kind of feeling around with the pencil. I wonder what it was like to stand there, maybe a bit cold, squinting to see, making marks to capture the essence of the view, the clouds and the mill. He almost certainly didn't plan the picture. And the drawing captures a fleeting moment, something that’s there and then gone. This reminds me that artists have been having these same conversations through their work for centuries, using marks and gestures to express something beyond words.