Moselandskab 1928

This is a landscape drawing by Fritz Syberg, we don’t know when exactly, but he was born in 1862 and died in 1939. Syberg uses a really accessible mark making style, the sort of thing anyone could pick up a pen and try, so it’s not about some kind of perfect technique, it’s about a way of seeing. The whole thing’s rendered in fairly simple pen strokes, mostly hatched lines moving horizontally across the page. You could say that Syberg’s just showing you how the landscape’s laid out: flat plains with a few trees sticking up at the front, and low hills in the distance. But when you look closely, you see how much variety he gets with just a few simple strokes. Check out the clumps of grass in the foreground: see how he varies the thickness and direction of the marks to create a sense of depth? This reminds me a little of Guston’s late pen and ink drawings, but where Guston is all about these gnarly, existential forms, Syberg is doing something softer and quieter. For Syberg it’s about describing the quiet beauty of the landscape, and not about some big statement, or clever artistic trick.