Breistertje 1894 - 1908

Henri Koetser made this drawing, Breistertje, with pen in grey ink, and brush in grey ink on paper. Koetser uses a nervous hatching to create a sense of form but also to give the whole scene a kind of vibrancy. Look at the way he renders the foliage around the figure, it’s almost as if the whole picture is alive and buzzing. In the lower foreground, there are twisting strokes that don’t quite describe anything, but give the sense of dense undergrowth. The figure of the girl knitting anchors the whole picture, but even she seems to be part of the landscape. You can see how the rhythm of the marks that create the landscape echoes in her clothing, and her hands and face are suggested with a similar economy of line. It reminds me of how Van Gogh’s drawings merge figure and ground, a kind of all-overness that insists on the picture plane as a surface. Ultimately, meaning is made through this approach to mark-making.