Landschap 1884 - 1927

Johan Antonie de Jonge made this landscape drawing with graphite. Look at the way he’s built the image with simple strokes, hatching the foreground and sky, and building up darker areas around the trees and buildings. It’s interesting to see how an artist translates a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Here, the graphite is almost like a memory of a place; a collection of marks indicating light and shadow, rather than trying to perfectly represent what was in front of him. There’s a looseness here, a freedom. See that scribble of lines at the top right? They’re like clouds, but they’re also just lines, marks on paper, an acknowledgement of the making process. Think of artists like Guston, later in the 20th century, who embraced a similar kind of freedom with line, or perhaps even some of Cy Twombly's drawings. Art is always a conversation, and drawings like this help us see how artists are always looking, responding, and finding new ways to see.