Landschap met wolkenlucht 1900 - 1931

Willem Bastiaan Tholen made this landscape with clouds in a sketchbook using a graphite pencil. It’s less about capturing something realistically and more about playing with the possibilities within the medium. The surface is raw, the lines are free, and the way Tholen layers the graphite gives the drawing a textured feel. The marks create a sense of depth and atmosphere, almost like you can feel the weight of the clouds, or the movement of the air. Notice the hatch marks on the left, how they give volume and mass to the cloud shapes. You can see the ghost of previous ideas, adjustments made as the artist worked, reflecting on the paper. You can almost imagine him sitting outside, squinting at the sky, and rapidly trying to capture the effect. Thinking about the work of Constable, his cloud studies come to mind, and how artists have always been interested in representing something that is so changeable, so hard to pin down. For me, that’s where the magic lies.