Stadsgezicht 1890 - 1946

Cornelis Vreedenburgh sketched this city view with pencil on paper. Look at how Vreedenburgh put down these sparse lines - they remind me that artmaking is as much a process of finding as of knowing. The pencil is thin and grey, barely there, really. The building emerges from what looks like a tangle, or a mess of looping lines, down in the lower left. Maybe it's a boat? You can see the artist searching for the form. It’s a kind of visual thinking. Rather than erasing any mistakes, he leaves the wandering lines on the page, making a record of his process. The eye jumps around, filling in the blanks, trying to make sense of it. This reminds me of the drawings of Guston. Like Vreedenburgh, Guston used drawing to figure out his paintings. Both artists embrace ambiguity, inviting us to join them in the act of seeing and discovering.