Louis Soutter

I'm trying to loosen up. To move away from the timid, gauche drawing style I've been so carefully cultivating. For inspiration, I wanted to look up the great and throbbing and sun-drenched and radiant sepia drawings that Van Gogh did in the summer of 1888 mostly, but the book was out of the library. Instead I happened upon the drawings of Louis Soutter (1871-1942), a Swiss artist, architect and violinist, whose abrupt descent into madness condemned to isolation and misery, but seemed to also release some primal expressive impulse that manifested itself in some very free and powerful drawings.

They make me think of the drawings of Bruno Schulz, but untethered, touching something more dangerous. They also remind me of Majka Kwiatowska's solemn, bleak but intensely alive early drawings.

The ones with fine lines are from Soutter's "mannerist" period, when he was at his most confident and had gotten a form of limited public recognition from a small group of fellow artists, like his cousin  Le Corbusier and Jean Giono, whom he befriended. The ones with thick blotches of ink were made with his fingers, when he was at the end of his life and losing his sight.