I am delighted that this drawing has been given a place in the 12th edition of The Large Dutch Art Calendar 2024.
Ci sei?
- size: 100 x 0.70 m
- paper: Fabriano, Molotow ink
Are you at home?
Are you at home is an ongoing series of contemporary tree drawings by visual artist Connie Dekker. The works grow from walking, observing, and spending long periods in the landscape. The drawings explore themes of stillness, of things emerging and dissolving, and of the layered structures found in single trees and small clusters of trees in the landscape.
Drawings, trees and hermits
- size: 100 x 70
- paper: Fabriano
Walking, looking, being still
Are you at home is a series of drawings that began with walking, looking, and being still. Trees offer me not only shapes and shadows, but also a way to pause – to enter a space where things are uncertain, layered, and always shifting.
I lay down flowing lines that try to follow the structure of a tree, but never in the precise, constructed way of the trees I know from Rembrandt, Brueghel, Sadeler or Bloemaert; the marks slip into line-patterns that seem already stored in my hand, lines I erase, return to, and rework. Some drawings are almost like quiet conversations between half-seeing and forgetting.
Moments caught in transition
There is no fixed plan. The image grows slowly — sometimes it drifts, sometimes it sharpens. In the drawings, trees mark out a place where forms are constantly emerging and dissolving.
Most works show a single tree or a small group; only when they are seen alongside one another do they begin to suggest a landscape of trees, more like its shifting edge than a complete view.
Each drawing is under construction in its own way: a moment caught in transition, incomplete but alive.
Studio view
- size: variable
- paper: Kraft
- acryl paint and Molotow ink
Poetry of incompleteness
By embracing slowness, fragility, and the tension between seeing and unseeing, Are you at home stays close to hesitation: to small shifts, to moments where looking falters and begins again. New meaning tends to arise in those in-between states, less through control than through the repeated sense that the drawing is not yet right, and needs to be worked over once more.
Rather than offering clear statements, I try to leave space – space for air, for not-knowing, for looking again. Each drawing remains slightly unresolved; there are edges that fray, lines that stop, traces of what has been erased.
That incompleteness matters to me. It keeps the image open, a place where something is still unfolding.
Are you there?
- size: A3
- paper: Kraft
Are you at home?