Udkast til Ester Balles gravmæle, med notater 1906

This sketchbook page, "Udkast til Ester Balles gravmæle, med notater," a preliminary sketch for Ester Balles tombstone, was made by Niels Larsen Stevns. The artist used a simple pencil on grid paper, probably sometime in the early 20th century. There's an immediacy and vulnerability to sketches. You see the artist thinking through the process, the false starts, the testing of different ideas on the page. The grid showing through from underneath, gives the impression the artist has used whatever was lying around. I'm drawn to the shapes of the proposed tombstones, they're almost like medieval swords, or crosses. The artist has combined text, image and sculpture, and there's something about the texture of the page and the rudimentary sketches which reminds me of Cy Twombly, he also captured that feeling of art as an open-ended question. It’s a reminder that art is a dialogue, always evolving, never truly finished.