Kale boom c. 1828 - 1897

Curator: This is a pencil drawing titled "Kale boom" by Adrianus Eversen, created sometime between 1828 and 1897. The drawing uses the realism style, depicting a simple line image of what seems to be a tree trunk and root system. What are your first impressions? Editor: Well, it feels fragile. Barely there. Just a ghost of a tree. It reminds me of early sketches from field journals where an artist is mapping the rough composition of an environment, but more skeletal than substantive. Curator: Exactly. Eversen's hand seems focused on pure form here. There is this wonderful fragility about the pencil on paper itself. Look at how the pencil marks barely register in places – this emphasis directs us to consider the artist's labor and technique. The very slightness makes you aware of the hand that created the marks. Editor: That "slightness" really accentuates the roots. Root systems are heavy with meaning; grounding, ancestry, the hidden substructure beneath what we perceive as reality. Do you think Eversen chose this view—of trunk and root only—to highlight symbolic underpinnings? Curator: That’s a possibility, yes. We know that pencil sketches like this were often studies for larger works. Perhaps Eversen was focusing specifically on how to depict the texture of bark or the way light catches on the roots of a tree for later integration into a more complex painting or another drawing using more sophisticated media. Editor: Yes. The linearity amplifies that reading for me. There's something almost diagrammatic in the treatment; as though Eversen wants to show the basic blueprint. I can almost feel a story here. Curator: In a way, the drawing provides us with raw material: a skeletal form ripe for projection of symbolic meaning as you have said, or conversely, for industrial reproduction to explore its very beingness, as if from a biological textbook. Editor: It's fascinating how much feeling he manages to convey with so few lines. The power of suggestion. Curator: Indeed. By considering its process, we unveil a tree not as representation, but as the record of labor: of graphite transferred, of hand and eye at work, to allow symbolic connection. Editor: Ultimately, a subtle sketch brimming with meaning. Curator: Precisely, revealing an inherent duality.