Udkast til "Kristus helbreder en spedalsk" 1937 - 1938

Niels Larsen Stevns made this sketch for “Christ healing a leper” with graphite on paper, and it’s the kind of drawing where the process is totally visible, laid bare for us to see. The grid behind the marks gives me the feeling that Stevns is thinking things through, working towards the finished piece, with a real focus on the architecture. There's something really satisfying in the way he’s used hatching to describe the volume of the figures. Check out the man kneeling in the lower centre, you can see the weight of his body, the position of his shoulders so clearly. I wonder if it's a nod to artists like Seurat, making scientific, measured marks to arrive at a whole. But in the end, for both artists, it’s the overall image that matters, the feeling that we get when we stand in front of the finished work.