Skitse af dyreskelet og lama-hoveder og -ben 1900 - 1905

This page of sketches of animal skeletons and llama heads and legs was made by Niels Larsen Stevns at an unknown date and with an unknown medium. It's not about finished forms, but more like the ghostly beginnings of things. The marks are tentative, searching. You can almost feel the artist circling the subject, trying to pin down its essence. It reminds me of my own process in the studio; it's about embracing the messy, the unresolved. See how the graphite lines create a delicate, almost fragile network, capturing the underlying structure and rhythm of the animal forms. Take the skeletal leg near the top of the page; it’s rendered with such spare, economical lines that it seems to float on the page, a ghostly reminder of the animal’s former life. This piece has a similar feel to some of Philip Guston’s gestural drawings, where the act of mark-making becomes a way of thinking through the subject, rather than simply representing it. And that’s what makes art so endlessly fascinating, isn’t it?