Meubelontwerp c. 1901

This is Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof's "Meubelontwerp," a furniture design, rendered with what looks like a simple graphite pencil on lined paper. It’s a peek into the artist’s process, all about the nuts and bolts, or rather, the lines and angles of creation. The texture of the paper, with its pale horizontal lines, becomes part of the drawing itself, grounding the furniture in a very real, tangible space. Dijsselhof plays with dimension, juxtaposing flat, diagrammatic views with a more ambitious perspectival sketch. See how he uses hatching to suggest shadow and depth? It’s like he’s thinking aloud, letting us in on his spatial calculations. The numbers and symbols scattered across the sheet aren’t just annotations; they’re like a secret code, a glimpse into the artist’s mind as he puzzles out the architecture of this potential furniture. Dijsselhof reminds me a bit of Sol LeWitt, who also used simple materials to create complex systems of thought. Like many artists, Dijsselhof invites us to see the beauty in the functional, to find poetry in the practical.