Ansigtsskitser 1906

This sketch by Niels Larsen Stevns is just a glimpse into the artist’s process, a dance of hand and eye. It’s probably graphite on paper; you can tell by the smudgy, soft quality of the marks. Look at how lightly he's touched the page. He's feeling out the forms, not trying to nail them down. The tentative quality of each line is really beautiful. There's a kind of energy in the repetition, the way he comes back to the same shape, again and again, like he's trying to understand it from every angle. It's like he’s having a conversation with himself, working out how to see. You know, these sketches remind me of Giacometti's drawings, where the figures seem to emerge from a cloud of lines. Art isn't always about answers, it’s about asking questions.