Bijgebouw op de plantage Gambar te Java c. 1921

Willem Witsen made this drawing of a building in Java using pen and ink, and you can feel the swelter of the sun bearing down. It's all tonal, shades of grey with a bit of creamy off-white, and the texture of the paper is part of the story too. I imagine Witsen sitting there, maybe wiping the sweat off his brow, trying to capture the scene before him. Did he feel like an outsider looking in, or was he at home here? The shapes of the leaves, the angles of the buildings – they all come together to create this feeling of a place caught between worlds. Those trees, though – the way he's captured their spindly branches reaching up towards the sky. It's kind of magical, like a secret language only they understand. It reminds me of some of my own ink drawings, where I'm trying to find the line between what's real and what's imagined. We are all in constant conversation with each other as artists, building our own world one line at a time.