Brug over een gracht 1890 - 1946

Cornelis Vreedenburgh made this drawing of a canal bridge with pencil on paper. There's a real sense of process and immediacy here. It’s like Vreedenburgh is thinking through the image, letting the pencil wander and explore. You can almost feel the artist deciding what to keep and what to let fade away. The textures he creates with the pencil are so varied, from the solid dark shadows on the right, to the loose, almost scribbled lines that suggest the water and foliage. It's the confidence in those simple lines that really grabs me. Look at the marks used to create the buildings: they have a kind of shorthand quality that is very effective in describing the architectural structure. It reminds me a bit of some of Philip Guston's more pared-down drawings, that same feeling of searching and questioning through the act of drawing. Art is not about answers, it's about the conversation, the back and forth between the artist and the work.