Gezicht op Tószeg, gezien vanuit het westen Possibly 1928

Albert van Giffen made this delicate pencil drawing, ‘Gezicht op Tószeg, gezien vanuit het westen’, sometime in the early twentieth century. It’s the kind of drawing you make when you want to record a place, quickly, before the light changes, or before you move on. The marks are tentative and light. Look at the way the artist captures the village, with quick vertical lines that suggest the architecture. It’s almost as if the pencil is just skimming the surface of the paper. And below, notice the squiggles in the foreground—field, water—they’re soft and rhythmic, like a whispered song. I like to think of these sorts of landscape drawings as a conversation, between the artist and the world. The artist is listening, observing, and responding, and the drawing becomes a record of that exchange. Think of Agnes Martin, her quiet, meditative drawings. There's something similar here, in the way Van Giffen captures the quiet beauty of a simple scene. Art is about embracing the understated, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.