Moselandskab 1928

This is Fritz Syberg’s, Moselandskab, a landscape drawing done with brown ink. The marks are like seismographic tremors—the quivers and shakes of a landscape, caught on paper. I imagine Syberg standing there, maybe it's cold, quickly trying to capture the essence of the scene. I think to myself: how do you make a landscape? You draw a line, then another, and another, until the land emerges from the page. You can see the artist searching, almost desperately, for the right marks to conjure a scene. Are they shorthand marks or careful notes? These hatch marks remind me of other painters like Van Gogh, of course, but also Alfred Kubin. There’s something about the feverish mark-making that feels connected. We, as artists, are always in conversation with each other, across time and space. We’re borrowing, stealing, and riffing off of each other's ideas. It's a beautiful, messy process. This landscape, this drawing, it's not just a picture of a place, it's a record of a mind in action.