Udkast til "Kristus helbreder en spedalsk" 1937 - 1938

Niels Larsen Stevns made this sketch for "Christ Healing a Leper" on paper, and you can see the bare bones of something really moving in the making. Look at the starkness of the lines, so sure and economical. It’s like he's trying to capture the essence of the moment, the raw emotion, with just a few strokes. I wonder what he was thinking about when he made this. Perhaps he imagined the leper's desperation and Christ's profound empathy, or perhaps he just wanted to see what the composition would look like? The contrast between the dark lines and the blank paper creates a kind of visual tension that draws you in. It reminds me of other artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker who were also grappling with how to convey human experience in its most basic form. It's like all artists, throughout time, are having a conversation. They show us new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, one sketch at a time.