Portret van Bouke Ylstra 1977

Rein Dool made this drawing of Bouke Ylstra with pencil on paper. What I see here is the bare minimum of marks needed to suggest a person. Dool works reductively, like he’s carving away at reality to find its essence. The drawing is pale, with the faintest suggestion of form and tone, just a whisper of light, yet it comes alive. Look at the way he draws the bridge of the nose, it’s almost one continuous line from the top of the glasses. This is like a gentle invitation into the mind of the sitter, catching his likeness with a gentle touch, a light observation. The whole thing has a kind of delicate hesitancy, a tenderness which reminds me of the portrait drawings of David Hockney, but with a much more limited tonal range. The space around the figure becomes just as important as the figure itself. There’s so much ambiguity here, and I love it.