Composition (The Cow) 1917

Theo van Doesburg made this drawing, called Composition (The Cow), with pencil on paper. Look at those lines, how they build up to suggest a form, a presence. I can almost feel the artist’s hand moving across the page, searching, refining. I wonder what van Doesburg was thinking about as he made this drawing? Was he trying to capture the essence of "cowness," or was he more interested in the act of reduction, of distilling something complex into simple geometric shapes? The beauty is in the mark making, the various weights of line he makes. The heaviness of each deliberate mark becomes something architectural. It makes me think about the way artists are constantly talking to each other, across time and space, borrowing and transforming ideas. And how each brushstroke, each line, is a record of a thought, a feeling, a moment in time.