Landschap met wolkenlucht 1900 - 1931

Willem Bastiaan Tholen made this landscape with clouds, presumably in his sketchbook, with a graphite pencil. I think of sketchbooks as the sites of freedom for an artist to explore and to make mistakes without consequences. It's the site of the try-out, the test, the un-resolved… The clouds are rendered with diagonal marks, almost like rain—maybe that’s what Tholen was after. You can see how he tested the weight and pressure of the pencil in his hand, varying the marks to create the illusion of a heavy sky. I can imagine him in his garden, squinting up at the sky. The sharp, almost vertical dark mark on the right of the page—is that a tree? A person? Painters are always in conversation with each other, across time. Tholen’s sketch brings to mind the cloud studies of Constable, yet the loose, expressive nature of his mark-making looks forward to 20th-century abstraction.