Gezicht op de Drommedaris te Enkhuizen 1938

This is Huib Luns's Gezicht op de Drommedaris te Enkhuizen, a drawing with pen in black ink, made sometime in the late 1930s. Look at the delicate cross-hatching, the way it builds up the forms of the buildings and the subtle reflections in the water. You can almost feel Luns standing there, his hand moving meticulously across the paper, capturing every little detail of the scene. I can imagine him thinking about the old masters, maybe Canaletto, or some of those Dutch landscape painters. He's not just copying what he sees, but interpreting it, finding a balance between realism and his own artistic vision. There's a certain moodiness, a sense of quietude that permeates the work. It’s easy to think about artists working in isolation but actually we're always in conversation with each other, across time and space. Luns looked back, and now, we're looking at him, finding new meanings and connections in his work.