Kompositionsudkast til Blichers novelle "Bettefanden", p. 129 - Bettefanden og Krushoved i Dybdalen. Afskrift fra samme l. 16-19 1932 - 1935

This is a study, a compositional sketch rendered in pencil on paper by Niels Larsen Stevns. There’s such immediacy here. I can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the page, deciding, then quickly making a mark. See how Stevns uses these wiry, scribbled lines to capture the figures and suggest movement and landscape? I imagine him outside, notebook in hand, trying to capture the essence of the scene before it vanishes. What did he want to emphasize? What to leave out? He’s making decisions about storytelling, about how to compress a narrative into a single image. It reminds me of other artists' sketchbooks I have seen – a kind of visual note-taking that is so full of potential. You see the artist wrestling with the subject matter, and it makes me think about how all painters are, in a way, always sketching, always searching for the right form. We are all learning from each other’s process and building on it. Painting, after all, is a conversation, and it's one I'm grateful to be a part of.