Figurkomposition - udkast til relief om forskellige håndværk? 1932 - 1935

This sketch for a relief was made by Niels Larsen Stevns, but we don’t know when. Look at all those exploratory marks! I love seeing sketches like this, it’s like being in the studio with the artist. You can see Stevns working it out, feeling his way into the composition with these bold strokes of ink. It's all about trying to capture the essence of different crafts, figuring out how to represent labor and skill in a monumental form. I imagine him thinking about the textures, the rhythms of the workshop, how to make all these different actions into a unified whole. Those marks are very powerful. They remind me of German Expressionist woodcuts and the way they used a similar vocabulary to communicate human feeling, intention, and meaning. This piece shows us that artists are always learning from and riffing off each other, across time and place. In the end, painting and drawing is this ongoing exchange, right? Always open, always in process.