Lony praat met gebalde vuisten tegen een pijprokende man before 1954

Hans Borrebach made this drawing of Lony talking with clenched fists to a pipe-smoking man, we don’t know exactly when, using ink and what looks like gouache on paper. It’s all about the relationship between line and tone. See how the drawing is created with confident black outlines, reminiscent of Hergé. Then the colours are blocked in. It's blue, but a kind of greyed-out blue, which creates a certain mood. There's an area of flat blue wash behind the man which bleeds softly at the edges and this makes me think of David Hockney, but Borrebach is earlier, so perhaps Hockney was looking at these kinds of illustrations. These colours are doing a lot of the work to create both depth and the mood. It’s not trying to be realistic, or painterly, it’s something in between; maybe there's a connection with someone like Philip Guston, later on, using cartoonish forms and flat colours, but with a serious emotional punch. Ultimately, it’s about how we make our own connections across time.