Portret Wim van Hooff 1944 - 1945

This small portrait of Wim van Hooff was made by an anonymous artist using sanguine on paper. It's like a whisper of a person, isn't it? I imagine the artist, maybe a friend, quickly sketching, trying to catch the light on Wim's face, the set of his jaw. You can almost feel the movement of the hand with the crayon, the pressure and release creating those soft shadows. The artist probably made marks, stepped back, squinted at the subject, then stepped forward to make more marks. There's something intimate about the scale, the warm, earthy tone of the sanguine. This is not about grand statements; it's about a moment, a feeling. It reminds me of those quick portraits artists make of each other, a kind of shorthand, a visual conversation. A bit like the way Morandi kept painting the same bottles, each time trying to see something new, something different. It's this kind of looking, this kind of exchange, that keeps painting alive.