Ontwerp voor een glas-in-loodvenster c. 1901

This is a design for a stained-glass window by Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof. It’s mostly lines, a faint, tentative structure mapped out in pencil on what looks like a page torn from a notebook. I’m thinking about the precision needed to create the final window, that each piece must fit perfectly into its leaded frame, but here, in this sketch, there's a lovely looseness. The artist must have considered how light would pass through the colored glass. I wonder if Dijsselhof imagined the colours as he drew or left that for later? Did he think about where it would hang and how the light would be different at different times of the day? The repeated geometric shapes have a meditative quality, like a mandala. It reminds me that art-making is always a conversation, across time and between artists and that each gesture is a kind of thought, an unfolding.