Blank 1864 - 1941

This ‘Blank’ artwork by Niels Larsen Stevns feels to me like a quiet moment. It is simply a blank page within a book, inviting us to imagine all that it could contain. I think about the artist, Stevns, his hand hovering, a pen or brush perhaps itching to make its mark. There's a delicious tension in that potential, the moment before creation. What was he thinking? What world was he on the cusp of bringing to life? I see in this blankness a whole history of art, all those canvases, walls, and pages waiting for expression. It reminds me that every artist starts with a void, an open space ripe with possibility. And each mark made is a courageous act of filling that void, a conversation with the past and a reaching toward the future.