Blank 1930 - 1936

Editor: This is Niels Larsen Stevns’ piece, *Blank*, made sometime between 1930 and 1936 using colored pencil on paper. It… looks unfinished? Just pale suggestions of shapes on aged paper. What am I supposed to be seeing here? What do you see in this drawing, or rather, lack of drawing? Curator: Oh, I find so much in its quietness. Isn't it funny how something seemingly unfinished can speak volumes? The almost-there quality… it teases the imagination, doesn't it? Do you sense a landscape, struggling to emerge? Editor: A landscape? I guess I can squint and *maybe* see some very faint rolling hills or something? But honestly, it mostly looks like a blank page with some smudges. Curator: Exactly! But even smudges hold intention, or at least, potential. Perhaps Stevns was exploring the very act of seeing, challenging us to fill in the blanks—pardon the pun—with our own experiences. Or perhaps, even more simply, just the starting point to something that didn't materialise, and THAT can be something. Imagine what this page 'witnessed' through it's state of apparent artistic incompletion. Think of the choices and erasures behind these faded pencil strokes. Does that shift how you view it? Editor: That’s an interesting way to think about it… the art of the almost-was. It’s like a ghost of a landscape. So, the beauty isn’t in what’s there, but in what *could have been*? Curator: Precisely! Or even the question, what still could be, but, for now, will remain only with us? It invites a more active participation from the viewer. This could be the world's first crowdsourced masterpiece, almost a century ahead of its time! It challenges us. Editor: I never thought about it like that! Curator: Now when you come back to it, you might see what it has for you! And what’s so bad about something blank anyway!