Fragment af blyantsskitse 1917 - 1920

This pencil sketch was made by Joakim Skovgaard, a while back, and it's now held at the SMK. It's a fragment – a glimpse of something larger, and I love that openness. The marks are delicate, tentative, like the artist is feeling their way around the form. There's a softness to the shading, achieved with layers of graphite, and the lines are not fixed but wavering, searching. See that area where the shading is denser? It's like a little storm of marks, building up a sense of depth and volume. You can almost feel the pressure of the pencil on the page there, the artist trying to capture something elusive. The whole thing has a provisional quality, like a thought in progress. It reminds me of the sketches of Degas – that same sense of capturing movement and form in a fleeting moment. Art isn't about certainty. It's about the questions we ask, the marks we make, and the conversations we have with the past.