Bomen aan water met zeilboten 1906

Simon Moulijn made this drawing of trees along the water with sailboats with pen and ink. You can see the process of making marks, the layering, the criss-cross hatching, all building up to create shadow and texture. It's almost like weaving a little nest of lines. Look at how the ink accumulates to create the illusion of depth. The foreground is built from dense clusters of marks, but as your eye moves back towards the horizon, the texture thins and fades into the distance. See how the artist uses negative space to suggest sunlight filtering through the canopy? It reminds me a little of Seurat, another artist who was interested in how individual marks come together to create a larger image. But where Seurat was all about scientific precision, Moulijn feels more intuitive, more emotional. Art is always a conversation.