Motief met meander en gestileerde bloemen c. 1890 - 1922

This line drawing of flowers and a meander pattern was made by Johanna van de Kamer, an artist working in the late 19th and early 20th century. Can you imagine her hand carefully mapping out the geometries of the image? I'm thinking about the nature of a line, how it contains so much potential energy. It is like the edge of a form or the diagram of a thought! The artist is carefully tracing the boundaries of these repeated blossoms, defining the positive and negative spaces around them. There’s a tension between organic and geometric shapes, a back and forth, like a dance. I wonder what she was thinking about while she drew these lines. Maybe she was thinking about how the meander pattern could symbolize eternity or the flow of life? It reminds me of other artists who explore pattern and repetition, like Hilma af Klint or Agnes Martin. Artists look at other artists all the time, they feed off each other. This feels like an intimate exchange of ideas, each line a quiet echo in the history of art.