Ontwerp voor een glas-in-loodvenster met honingraatpatroon c. 1901

Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof made this design for a stained-glass window with a honeycomb pattern, probably in the late 19th or early 20th century, using pencil and watercolor on paper. It's all about process. You can see the artist working through ideas, the lines of the graph paper peeking through. The texture is flat, of course, being on paper, but the lines, the colours, they give it a kind of depth. It’s like he's building the window right in front of us. The yellow is so subtle, almost like a whisper, guiding the eye around the honeycomb shapes. Look at how he uses these lines to create the edges of the honeycombs, and how they seem to vibrate. Dijsselhof was part of the Dutch Art Nouveau movement, and you can see that love of nature and pattern here. It reminds me of Hilma af Klint's early diagrams, searching for hidden structures. It’s all connected, this dance of ideas across time.