Grene over vand 1928

Fritz Syberg made this pen and ink drawing, "Grene over vand," which translates to "Branches Over Water," sometime in his lifetime, with the SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst holding it now. The surface is teeming with tiny, rapid marks which together comprise a landscape scene. It’s a landscape rendered spontaneously, almost automatically. The marks are incredibly dense, but when you focus on a particular detail, like the light reflections on the water, they become legible as individual gestures. The density of marks makes the image almost illegible, as if the artist is showing us not what the scene looks like, but what it feels like. The feeling is one of immersive chaos, as if the drawing is an attempt to capture the sensory experience of being fully immersed in nature. It makes me think of a Cy Twombly painting – a similarly immediate, gestural, and intuitive approach to mark-making. Art is a conversation!