Udkast til "Kristus helbreder en spedalsk" 1937 - 1938

Niels Larsen Stevns made this pencil drawing, a study for "Christ Healing a Leper," on a page torn from a graph paper notebook. It’s all tentative lines and erasures. I imagine Stevns grappling with the weight of a miracle, how to represent such a thing. Look at the repeated, searching marks. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the page, trying to capture the right pose, the perfect gesture of healing. I think it might be helpful to know that Stevns was deeply engaged with religious and spiritual themes, so he might have been thinking about faith, compassion, and the power of healing. These lines aren’t just marks on paper, they’re little tremors of thought, and attempts to make visible the invisible. Sketches like this remind us that finished paintings, like the one he was working towards, are often built on foundations of doubt, questions, and sheer persistence. Like he was thinking his way through the composition. He's in dialogue with every other artist who has ever tried to capture something profound in an image.