Schip op een werfhelling 1906 - 1945

Reijer Stolk made this pencil drawing, called ‘Ship on a Slipway’, on paper, but when exactly, we don't know. Look at this skeletal ship taking shape, all hard angles and forceful lines. I imagine Stolk, maybe with the wind whipping around him, trying to capture the essence of this industrial scene. The criss-crossing lines create a sense of volume, but also a kind of controlled chaos, like the energy of the shipyard itself. The texture comes from the hatching of the pencil, which really makes you feel the roughness of the materials, the grit of the place. I wonder if he was thinking about cubism, this way of breaking down form into its basic shapes. It's almost like he’s building the ship on paper just like they’re building it in the yard. There’s a real sense of process here, of something coming into being through labor and vision.