Dræb mig kun... 1928

Fritz Syberg made this ink drawing called ‘Dræb mig kun…’ on paper, and it's the kind of piece where you can really see the artist working. Look at how Syberg uses these scribbly, scratchy marks to build up the swans and the water. It’s all about the process, the layering of lines, and the way the ink bleeds into the paper. You can almost feel the pen moving across the surface. The texture is so alive, especially in the way the water is described with all those horizontal lines, it's almost vibrating. Then you have these swans, built up with dense patches of ink, but still so light and airy. There’s this one swan, right in the foreground, and the way its neck curves and twists—it’s like the artist is trying to capture the very essence of swan-ness. You could look at Picasso or Matisse, artists known for their simplified, expressive lines, to see a similar embrace of spontaneity and gesture, an understanding of art as an ongoing experiment.