Blank 1864 - 1941

Curator: Today, we're looking at "Blank," a drawing made with watercolor on paper by Niels Larsen Stevns, dating roughly between 1864 and 1941. It’s part of the collection at the SMK, Statens Museum for Kunst. Editor: It is… understated, isn't it? It immediately evokes the silence and the weight of unspoken potential. A kind of expectant emptiness. Curator: Well, exactly! Consider the materiality of the paper itself. It has clearly aged, it has a certain wear, the subtle discolouration indicating its history. Was this meant as a starting point for an artwork or something else? Editor: The open page facing us carries so much meaning! What would be written or sketched here? I'm curious, considering the artist’s context, what were the aesthetic ideals and what stories might this blankness represent? Curator: And, the labor embedded in its creation must not be ignored. The paper’s production, its availability, the artist’s choice to use it...these elements give texture and significance to our experience, wouldn't you agree? It is a book so could we understand the means through its content that once was in its origin, if the blankness doesn’t symbolize the possibilities in and by itself? Editor: Definitely. The blank page has been understood for ages. Think of ideas like "tabula rasa," but here, instead of new knowledge and experiences, this symbol of absence, evokes all kinds of knowledge, but leaves the spectator guessing, what was planned to be displayed here. It may provoke ideas such as existential meaning, uncertainty, self creation or something as simple as a loss of meaning, lack of motivation or demotivation. Curator: Perhaps the power of this image resides in its inherent lack of imposed intention. What does this imply when it comes to artistic intention, execution, and meaning-making? We often valorise filled pages or canvases in order to highlight completed actions but are the beginning or intentions themselves also worthy of merit or more powerful than a so called "end result"? Editor: You're giving me chills now. A whole host of emotional possibilities arise from the blankness itself and all of our human experience is connected with that specific feeling or uncertainty. Curator: And with all of those symbolic values considered in the creative process of Stevns’ creative context it can have had the intent of representing that in his era, too. A humble, and very direct, social comment or artistic process demonstration about its artistic field. Editor: I see more in this drawing now. That expectancy, that feeling that the next chapter, be that creative or personal is just within reach, waiting to be filled out.