Hoofd 1875 - 1934

This drawing, ‘Hoofd’, was made by Isaac Israels, probably with charcoal or graphite on paper. Israels uses a bare minimum of marks, just enough to give you a sense of a head, a kind of ghost in the machine. The drawing feels really immediate, like he was trying to capture something fleeting. You can almost feel the speed of his hand, the way he quickly laid down those lines. It’s so sparse, so economical – it reminds me of some of Guston’s late work, when he was stripping everything down to just the essentials. There’s a vulnerability to it, a sense of something being unfinished or unresolved. That little cluster of lines describing the hair, almost scribbled, it’s like he’s trying to pin something down but it keeps slipping away. Ultimately it’s this sense of imperfection that makes it so alive, that keeps me coming back to look again. It’s a reminder that art isn’t about perfection, but about process.