Schetsen 1884 - 1885

Editor: We're looking at "Sketches," a drawing done in pencil by James Ensor between 1884 and 1885. It feels...intimate, somehow, like a peek into the artist's personal sketchbook. All these layered drawings create a wonderfully mysterious impression. What jumps out at you when you look at this, given how many sketches there are? Curator: Ah, Ensor! With Ensor, one never quite knows where fancy begins and reality ends. Do you notice how the visible sketches seem to occupy their own separate dimensions? Each little vignette pulses with its own weird rhythm. To me, it’s almost like leafing through the artist's mind: snippets of observed reality mixed with fleeting, subconscious images, colliding on a single plane! What do make of the seemingly unfinished nature of the sketches, then? Do they come across as failures or incomplete thoughts? Editor: That’s a great question. I hadn’t considered they might be “failures”. Now that you mention it, maybe it suggests something about the creative process, the messiness and constant self-correction. It does come across like a record, or diary of his observations, without ever focusing on just one thing. Curator: Precisely. It begs the question, doesn’t it? Is a discarded thought any less valuable than a fully realized idea? In many ways, it offers a far more insightful look into Ensor’s thinking, stripping bare the man beneath the painter, with only these intimate traces, never really solved... Editor: I see that now. So, it's more about the journey of creation, or the artist’s inner world, than about a polished end product. Very enlightening! Curator: And for me too, the idea that Ensor allows the viewer into these moments is as intimate as it is a valuable glimpse into his art!