A Nice Museum

Last weekend I visited museum ‘De Lakenhal’ at Leiden, Netherlands to see the exhibition ‘Rembrandt and the Golden Age’. Quite nice, also to see the refurbished museum. For everyone who is not familiar with it, the place houses the ‘Day of Reckoning’ by Lucas van Leyden. Certainly that is worth the trip, let alone all the other 17th century art on display. When I looked out the windows at the front of the building I oversaw the Oude Vest. That is the canal just outside and it reflected the light through the ancient window glass. It was beautifully filtered and looked a little bit sinister. There were also gloomy clouds in the sky which led me to draw this one.

A Certain Degree of Realism

Some specific details on the entry wall I had to execute quite reastically. Otherwise I risked a certain degree of unrecognizability that makes or breaks a good work of art. I always try to prevent a situation where people have to wild guess. That makes a work of art ‘uncertain’ so to speak. Even though there could be a great main theme it will not be unrevealed eventually. Perhaps that is one of the reasons of my figurative endeavours. As I put these words on paper I reluctantly confess that such motivations could easily lead to lecture-style works. Do you think so?

Roundism

In order to compensate for the straight and angular structures I rendered the trees in my roundism style. The Winsor & Newton paper took care of a grainy effect, enhancing the gloom even more. My graphite pencil drawing ‘Voorlinden 11-07-19’ is an example of a combination of realist, impressionist and roundism styling. I saw that I pulled the same trick though as in an earlier drawing ‘Oss – 05-01-17’.In this one as well as the latter I extrapolated the tree curves into the clouds, giving it rhythym. I think I might have done so because such landscapes can look a bit static all too quickly.

Click here to see the build-up of the drawing.

Graphite pencil drawing (Pentel 0.5 mm, 3B) on Winsor & Newton paper (21 x 14.8 x 0.1 cm – A5 format)

Artist: Corné Akkers

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