Blank 1930 - 1936

This is a page from a sketchbook by Niels Larsen Stevns, dating from around the turn of the last century. It’s pale, a ghostly image in blue pencil on creamy paper. Look closely, and you can see how the image seems to emerge from a tangle of lines. The marks are tentative, searching, building up to suggest a figure beneath some kind of canopy. There’s a real sense of process here, like we’re seeing the artist thinking on the page. See that denser patch of lines just to the right of the figure's head? It reminds me of Cezanne, how he'd work an area over and over, building up a sense of volume and space through repetition. Stevns clearly shared that commitment to the act of seeing, of working through an image to find its essence. Like with the work of other artists who embraced the unfinished, this piece reminds us that art is a journey, not just a destination.