Vrouw in vlak landschap 1901

Simon Moulijn made this drawing of a woman in a flat landscape with pencil on paper. What strikes me is the all-overness of the marks, how he builds up the image with tiny strokes. It's like he’s feeling his way through the landscape, one tiny mark at a time. The texture of the paper becomes part of the image, doesn’t it? The pencil seems to dance across the surface, catching on the little bumps and grooves. Look how the woman seems to emerge from the field. The shadow of the figure is just a denser patch of marks, a darkening of the field. It's a subtle, quiet kind of magic. This reminds me of Seurat, another artist who embraced a kind of pointillist mark making. But where Seurat is all about scientific precision, Moulijn feels more intuitive, more like he’s trying to capture a feeling, a mood. In the end, it’s not about what we see, but how we see it.