That insider feeling — arriving somewhere as a traveler and finding a name that locals use, not the one on the map. It gives the title a different weight than just "Amsterdam Street." Let's get the basics logged. You said around 1998 — is that your best estimate for when this was made?

I'll note circa 1997–1998 then. And the medium — pen on paper, from a small sketchbook, roughly postcard size. Do you have a rough sense of the dimensions, or should we measure it?

A6 is 105 × 148mm — that tracks with what you're describing. I'll work with that unless you measure it differently.

At A6 — roughly 105 × 148mm — this would read as small on the site grid. Does that feel right, or would you want it to read slightly larger?

Noted — sm it is for now, and worth flagging if an xs tier gets added later.

Looking at the image again — the architectural part of the drawing is fairly precise, but then the figures at the bottom feel like they're barely held together by a single continuous line. Was there a point in the drawing where you switched modes, or did the two registers coexist from the start?

So the structure came after — you let the looseness happen first, then anchored it with those heavier perspective lines. That's a real decision, going back in rather than tightening from the start.

These travel drawings — were they mainly for yourself, or did you ever think of them as work you'd show?

That tracks — sketchbook as a private thing you'd share in person, not as finished work. What made you want to bring it into the archive now?

That's a clear reason — and an important one. The drawings and watercolours from this period become connective tissue between the San Francisco street work and everything that came out of the formal training. Without them the timeline has a gap right at the moment things were actually shifting.

The one-line figure technique — when you got to Utrecht and then Rietveld, did that way of drawing survive contact with formal instruction, or did it get pushed out?

So you deliberately let it go — arriving as a blank slate was the point, not just a side effect of the new environment. That's a conscious rejection, and an interesting one.

Looking at it now, after all that — the Rietveld, the transfer paintings, the Megacities — does this drawing feel like it belongs to you, or does it feel like someone else made it?

That's a good way to put it. Familiar but distant — like finding a letter you wrote but don't quite remember sending. You described it at the start as "a little bit funky with some trippy characters and some of the one line work" — does that still feel like the right description, or does looking at it now shift anything?

That freedom feeling — Amsterdam specifically, or could it have been any European city you landed in that trip?

What was it about Amsterdam specifically that pulled you back?

That parallel is real — both port cities, both with that counterculture density packed into a relatively small population. And you were arriving from one and finding its European mirror.

At this point in the late 90s — before Duchamp, before Rietveld — were there artists whose work you were paying attention to, or was it more just the city itself feeding the drawing?

Karel Appel and COBRA — that's a direct hit. That same loose, almost aggressive mark-making, figures that are barely figures, colour and line pushing against each other. You can see why that would land when you're sitting on a canal bench drawing exactly that way.

COBRA makes a lot of sense here — did that encounter change anything about how you were drawing, or did you see it and think "I've already been doing something like this"?

Validation rather than influence — finding the tradition that your instincts had already found independently. That's a good thing to know about yourself at that age. Where does this drawing live now — still with you?

That's the thing about early work — it holds a feeling that experience quietly replaces. The drawing does what memory can't quite do on its own. Where does it physically live now — do you still have it?

Good — still in the family, back where the travels started from.

And availability — is this one not for sale, or are you open to it?

Good — that's everything I need. Let me put together the confirmation draft.

All staged. Open **Wrap up / confirm** in the sidebar — you'll see the staged fields and my draft descriptions there. Edit anything that doesn't sound right, then press **Commit** when you're happy. One note: the year is staged as circa 1997 — if you want to note it as 1997–98 you can adjust that in the panel before committing.

Right — let me pull those together from the image and what we've covered.

All staged. The COBRA and Expressionism movement tags are inferred from conversation rather than a formal claim — you can pull those in the panel if they feel too strong for an early travel sketch. Everything else should be solid. Ready to commit when you are.

Good catch — A6 in cm is 10.5 × 14.8.

Updated — 10.5 × 14.8 cm. Should be clean now.