Laren en Blaricum 1915

Jan Fekkes made this drawing of Laren en Blaricum sometime between 1900 and 1933 using pencil on paper. Look at the top of the image. See how he’s built up the clouds with these tiny, layered marks? I imagine Fekkes standing in a field, maybe in the late afternoon. He squints, looks up and down, composing the scene in his mind. I can almost feel the breeze in his hair as he painstakingly renders the landscape, each stroke of the pencil building up the texture of the fields, the trees, the distant buildings. The pencil marks are dense and light, building form. That patient observation reminds me a little of Cezanne, especially how he built up the landscape in his paintings, with lots of small hatched marks. I think all artists are in an ongoing conversation, building on each other's ways of seeing. There's something very special about the way a simple pencil can capture so much light and depth.