Man achter een bureau vol boeken 1880 - 1932

Emil Orlik’s ‘Man Behind a Desk Full of Books’ is a drawing that might have been made with charcoal, or maybe pencil; I like the way it fills the page, soft and shadowy, and the way the artist works the soft material of the pencil, pushing at the textures on the page. I can imagine Orlik in the studio, working late into the night, hunched over this drawing, a little obsessed with the fall of light. This is the feeling I get, anyway. It’s all there in the hatching marks. See how the quick, loose lines build the volumes of books? How they fade in and out of the light? The textures of those marks communicate so much, like the shifting, subtle tones of a song. There’s something about the intimacy of a drawing; it allows for a kind of meandering, intuitive inquiry. It feels like Orlik is thinking and seeing at the same time. Drawing has always had this kind of immediacy for artists. It’s a form of embodied expression, inviting multiple interpretations and meanings.