Ontwerp voor een juwelenkistje Possibly 1913

Mathieu Lauweriks made this design for a jewelry box with pencil and colored pencil on graph paper. I love the way the spirals mirror each other, it's a dance of symmetry and repetition that you see so much in design, but what was Lauweriks thinking as he was drawing these lines? Was he just trying to make something pretty, or was he digging deeper, trying to find the underlying mathematical order of things? I bet he was. There's an almost obsessive quality to the design – the kind of thing you do when you are trying to work something out, when you are not quite sure where you are going but you just keep going, line after line, shape after shape. The simple addition of color brings the piece alive. I can imagine him carefully choosing each shade, thinking about how it would play against the metal, and about the way different colors sit together. These are considerations painters make when choosing a palette, I recognize it. It’s amazing how ideas can travel through art and time.