A Great Band

The 26th of December 2017 I was attending a concert by the Symfonie Orkest Nijmegen in the Stevenskerk at Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands. It’s my hometown and they have a great orchestra playing Händel among others. Besides that, two friends of old are part of the band. Nice to see them play after many years. I know the church very well since it dominates the skyline of Nijmegen, the city were I was born and raised. I didn’t see the interior that often though. What strikes me is the spatiousness and light interior. That sets it apart from other church buildings I know.

Struck by Light

During the concert I was struck by the light coming through the windows creating rhythym and echoing through in the diction of the paper white of the music sheets. While listening to the musicians it became clear that this was a done deal. I had to come up with a drawing of what I saw there. So I took a photo and enjoyed the music nevertheless. I didn’t have a sketchbook to hand anyway.

Diagonal Beams

Once back at home I studied the photo throroughly. How to render the scenery and prevent the tendency to get all the details right? Luckily I had my graphite pencil drawing ‘Dordrecht – -07-12-17’ as an example. That one I consider a perfect mixture of impressionism and roundism. Something similar could be suitable for this scenery. The pulpit, stained glass windows and big chandeleer were all too inviting to do so. I decided to counterbalance the verticals of the high aisles with curves caused by the stained glass windows. furthermore I used the diagonals of the pulpit to cause an echo made by the bass players. Actually they were they only members of the orchestra I could see from that point of view but the music sounded swell.

Click here to read about the sale of this art work to a dutch collector.

Graphite pencil drawing (Pentel 0.5 mm, 3B) on Strathmore Bristol paper (21 x 29.7 x 0.1 cm – A4 format)

Artist: Corné Akkers