Ruiter te paard binnen rood kader c. 1965 - 1980

This print by Aat Verhoog features a horse and rider neatly contained in a red frame. Look how Verhoog uses clear, flat colours and an obsessive kind of mark making that gives the piece a really distinctive feel. There's something almost like needlepoint about the surface of the 'ground', this painstaking accumulation of tiny marks. The red frame sits as a kind of interruption, cutting off the horse and rider from the rest of the scene, like a memory, or a kind of looking glass. Then the top fifth of the picture is just plain, flat, blue - is it water, sky, or just a big stripe? Verhoog’s work, often featuring landscapes and figures, reminds me a little bit of Fairfield Porter. He had this very calm, cool gaze - an understated and ambiguous perspective. With both artists, you feel the process of looking, thinking, and making are all completely entangled.