Plantestudie 1906 - 1910

Niels Larsen Stevns made this plant study with what looks like a graphite stick or maybe charcoal, right there in his sketchbook. The strokes are so sure, so solid. I can almost see him outside with his book, quickly sketching as the light flickers through the leaves. It's like he’s trying to catch the essence of each leaf—the way it reaches out, the way it curls. Each stroke seems to build the form, not rigidly, but with a real sense of the leaf’s living energy. And there’s a cool kind of abstract thing going on too, where the leaves almost become patterns, shapes bumping up against each other. It’s like he's showing how nature itself is just a set of marks, lines, and rhythms. And in that way, we painters are always trying to speak the same language as nature, or at least borrowing its best lines.