Ontwerp voor een machine 1906 - 1945

Reijer Stolk designed this machine on paper, and it’s now at the Rijksmuseum. I wonder if Stolk saw himself as an engineer or an artist? What I love about these types of drawings is their immediacy. You see the artist thinking, right there on the page. Lines wobble and cross, and the composition emerges through a process of trial, error, and intuition. It reminds me of doodling in class when I was a kid. The cross-hatching, the circles – it’s almost like he's trying to give dimension to something that exists only in his mind. What was the intention? What type of machine was this supposed to be? We can only guess. Ultimately, it’s a conversation between Stolk, the machine, and us. He is inviting us to think about what could be, and about the creative possibilities that sketching offers.