Skitser af planter og anden ornamentik 1906

Niels Larsen Stevns made this study of plants and ornament on a page torn from a graph paper notebook. I love how Stevns uses this page as a place to record a range of ideas in tandem, we can observe how his mind is flitting from the botanical, to the structural, to the ornamental. You can see how the flower at the top corner has been loosely blocked in with green and yellow washes, but the main emphasis is on the graphic quality of the line. The lines feel tentative, open to revision, as if he’s working through the problems of representation in real time. Look at how the hard geometry of the graph paper peeks through the image, grounding it with its underlying structure. The flower reminds me of Marsden Hartley’s landscapes, there’s a similar flattening of space and emphasis on color as a vehicle for emotion. But where Hartley is declarative, Stevns feels open and provisional, like he’s allowing us to witness the messy process of artmaking. It reminds us that art is a verb as much as it is a noun, a process not a product.