Gezicht op Huis Heijen in Heijen, Limburg before 1915

This picture of Huis Heijen in Limburg, well, it's sepia, or black and white, but it speaks volumes even without a date or a known maker. I can see the careful strokes, the artist trying to capture the essence of this big old house. There are strong horizontal marks, suggesting the long stretches of field and building. And then, those vertical strokes – maybe the artist was thinking about the height of the house, the way it reaches up to the sky. Imagine them standing there, squinting and feeling the sun, trying to distill the image into something meaningful. I'm thinking about landscape painters, like Constable or Corot, how they were trying to capture something essential about a place. This artist is part of that conversation, that long and winding back-and-forth. Each artist picking up where the other left off. It's not about perfection. It's about that feeling of being there, in that moment, trying to make sense of what you're seeing. It’s like a painter friend of mine always says: you don’t so much make a painting, but make way for a painting.