Skitser af en ko 1864 - 1941

Niels Larsen Stevns made these cow sketches with pencil on paper. There’s something so immediate about studies like this, you know? The artist is trying to capture the essence of the animal, its weight, its form, just by observing it in real-time. You can see the artist thinking, ‘how do I render the bulk of this creature with just a few lines?’ I can imagine Stevns, sitting in a field, quickly scribbling, trying to pin down the cow's form before it shifts or moves away. Look at the way he uses hatching to suggest shadow and volume, it’s so economical! These quick, expressive marks communicate everything. You feel the weight of the cow. Maybe Stevns was thinking about other artists who’d drawn animals, like how Delacroix captured the power of lions. Artists are always in conversation, riffing off each other across time. Sketching, like any form of art, is a form of embodied expression, an embrace of ambiguity and uncertainty.