Heiwerk op de Overtoom te Amsterdam c. 1912

George Hendrik Breitner made this drawing, Heiwerk op de Overtoom te Amsterdam, with graphite on paper, and it looks like he was working fast! You can almost feel him capturing the scene as it unfolds. I love how the textures and tones are built with these energetic marks. See how the vertical hatching suggests the play of light and shadow on the structure to the left? Then your eye flicks back to the figure standing on the platform, and you notice that the one small daub of blue brings the whole image into focus. It's almost like a full stop at the end of a sentence. The looseness reminds me of Cy Twombly, but with more grounded subject matter. Both artists share that sense of immediate, intuitive mark-making. It's a reminder that art doesn't always have to be about precision, it can also be about capturing a feeling, an instant, a fleeting moment in time.