Vajda Lajos House Walls in Szentendre, 1937, Pencil on Paper, 22.5x31.5cm 1937

Vajda Lajos made this drawing of the house walls in Szentendre in 1937, using pencil on paper. I can imagine him there, trying to resolve the many faces of a building on a flat page, mapping one plane onto another. Look how the pencil lines become scaffolding, holding everything in place. And, it feels like there’s this constant push and pull between representation and abstraction, playing with perspective and form. It reminds me of cubist paintings and surrealist dreamscapes, where reality gets fractured and reassembled in unexpected ways. I wonder if he was thinking about the passage of time, or the way that memory distorts our perception of space. I bet he was walking around the village trying to capture the spirit of the place. Ultimately, it's a reminder that art is about so much more than just what we see on the surface. It's about the artist's inner world, their thoughts, feelings, and experiences all coming together.