Kop van een man 1906 - 1945

Reijer Stolk made this drawing, Kop van een man, with graphite on paper, and it's now at the Rijksmuseum. When I look at this work, I think about the gesture of drawing as a mode of thinking. It is a beautiful head formed through these scratchy, scribbly, marks. I love this sense of something coming into being, bit by bit. It seems like a work of intuition, of feeling one’s way through the subject, constantly correcting and adjusting. I wonder, who was this man? Was he someone Stolk knew well? A stranger glimpsed on the street? Maybe it's even Stolk himself in the mirror? It's lovely how drawings like this can be so direct and so intimate at the same time. Stolk’s drawing reminds us that the simplest of means – a pencil, a piece of paper, and an observant eye – can result in works of tremendous depth and feeling. Like the way that artists are always in conversation, influencing each other across the ages.