Koepelkerk in een landschap 1910 - 1918

Alexander Shilling made this drawing of a domed church, probably en plein air, directly into a sketchbook. Notice how the landscape is blocked in with soft, grey graphite marks, a shorthand for rendering trees and buildings. It’s that beautiful, provisional, searching quality that gives a work like this its special energy. On the right-hand page, you can see how the domed church emerges from a thicket of marks. The graphite is rubbed into the paper, smudged almost, to give the impression of light and shadow. See how some of the lines are darker, more assertive, while others are barely there, like whispers. For me, that dark patch of graphite near the bottom anchors the composition, giving it weight and a sense of grounding. This reminds me of Cezanne's watercolors. There's a similar feeling of tentative exploration and a willingness to let the process be visible. Art, after all, is an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time. And in this little sketch, Shilling reminds us that art embraces ambiguity and the beauty of the unfinished.