Arbre et Ciel 1938

Léon Spilliaert made this drawing, Arbre et Ciel. It is a muted, grey scene, almost ghostly. It's so quiet, you can almost hear the scratch of the pencil. I imagine him, out there in the cold, bundled up, trying to capture something so fragile. He's drawing fast, because he's cold. The bare branches reach up like veins, a network against the sky. It makes me think about what the drawing shares with other paintings. Maybe Guston's late works, or Agnes Martin's delicate lines, all artists trying to find a way of understanding the world by drawing it, by making marks. In a way, all paintings are like a conversation. We look at them and we add our own thoughts and experiences. Spilliaert’s trees become a place for us to wander, to think about the beauty and the strangeness of being alive.