Uitzicht op een aan zee gelegen dorp vanaf een schip c. 1936

Cornelis Vreedenburgh made this pen drawing, titled 'Uitzicht op een aan zee gelegen dorp vanaf een schip', and it's like a quicksilver thought caught on paper. You can almost feel the rocking of the boat in the looseness of the lines. Look at how the village on the horizon is suggested with the tiniest dashes and dots. It's a process of distillation, reducing a complex scene to its bare essence. The texture of the paper becomes part of the work, giving it a sense of immediacy, like a page torn from a sketchbook. That scrawled bit in the foreground, maybe a figure or some rigging, has a nervous energy to it. It's this kind of shorthand that reminds me of the playful simplicity of Cy Twombly’s sketches. Both artists embrace the beauty of the unfinished, the suggestion of form rather than its precise rendering. It’s a conversation about seeing, about how much you can say with just a few marks. It’s open, not closed.