The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees, Vincent van Gogh, pencil, pen, reed pen and brush and ink, on paper, 19 x 24 in. (49 x 61 cm), in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

As much as I enjoy the color in Vincent Van Gogh’s later works, for which he is justly renowned, many of my favorite pieces by him are drawings.

These are technically monochromatic, largely drawn with the same ink in any given drawing, but applied throughout in such varying degrees of appearance that one could think of the variations as colors.

Belying the crudity of his eariest attempts at drawing when he was doggedly working to teach himself how to draw (a remarkable story in intself), Van Gogh’s later drawings were highly sophisticated and quite extraordinary in how he used his materials.

Just look at the astonishing variation of marks he employs in this drawing: short marks, long marks, bold chunky lines, delicate filagree, smooth curves, sharply angular lines, hatching, crosshatching, stipple, the differing degrees of light and dark in his applicaion of water in the ink, and soft brush marks aside the crisper ones in reed pen.

Then go back just to appreciate the variation in the direction of his marks.

Inspiring.