Vignet voor biografie van Gestel door Prof. W. van der Pluym c. 1936

Leo Gestel made this ink drawing, Vignet voor biografie van Gestel door Prof. W. van der Pluym, in 1929. Just looking at the marks on the page, I can imagine Gestel hunched over a table, the scratch of the pen, the smell of the ink – it all seems so immediate. I’m struck by the directness and simplicity of this vignette. It feels like he's scratching away at the page with his pen, thinking about the place, the little church spire. What was he thinking when he made this? Was it a sunny day? Was he remembering something, or just trying to capture a feeling, a memory? The strokes that define the form of the trees in the foreground are particularly interesting; I can see the thickness and thinness of the lines and how he modulates the pressure on the pen, the texture of the paper. Gestel and his contemporaries were constantly grappling with these questions of representation and abstraction. Looking at his wider body of work, I see an ongoing conversation about the possibilities of mark-making, how a simple line can evoke so much. Artists are constantly building on each other's ideas!