Lammet 1933 - 1934

This small sketch, "Lammet", was made by Niels Larsen Stevns, we don't know exactly when. It's a quick little study in pencil, done in a notebook, you can see the squared paper underneath. The lamb, or lambs, plural, are barely there. You can see the artist figuring out their shape and stance. It's all about the energy of the line, isn't it? Nervous, searching. It is a great example of Stevns' loose sketching style. The marks are so immediate, so unpretentious. Look at the lamb in the lower part of the page. It feels like he is using a kind of shorthand to describe its woolly fleece. It reminds me of Cy Twombly's scribbled drawings, where the meaning is less about the thing represented and more about the act of drawing itself. It's about the thinking-through-drawing. It embraces the provisional, the open-ended. It's a reminder that art is not about answers, but about questions.