Skitse af stiliseret landskab med farveangivelser ovenpå halvudviskede notater 1905 - 1907

This drawing, *Skitse af stiliseret landskab med farveangivelser ovenpå halvudviskede notater*, was made by Niels Larsen Stevns sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century in what looks like a sketch book. It's such a process-oriented piece. You can see the ghostly remains of old ideas, like a landscape, or maybe just an arrangement of shapes, that Stevns has laid notes over. It's like he’s having a conversation with himself. The texture of the paper, the softness of the pencil, it all feels so immediate, so much like a thought caught in the act of becoming something. The lines are tentative, searching, almost like he's not quite sure what he's looking for. And then, in the middle of all this scribbling, these vertical lines, like reeds almost, that anchor the whole thing. It reminds me a little of Cy Twombly's notebooks, where the act of writing and drawing become one and the same. It’s that lovely place where art embraces the provisional, the ambiguous, and the ever-changing.