Bonden ved den frosne sø 1928

Fritz Syberg made this drawing of a man by a frozen lake with ink on paper. Look at the marks! There’s a nervousness and a vulnerability, a way the ink kinda scratches at the surface. It's like the artist is figuring out what the hell he is seeing. I can imagine Syberg out there, in the cold, squinting at the light, trying to nail down what he sees. The quick strokes that define the reeds and the delicate lines that suggest the distant hills make it look like he’s working really fast, trying to catch a fleeting moment. The figure of the man, hunched over, feels lonely and pensive. What's he thinking? Is he contemplating the landscape, or lost in his thoughts? Does he come here often? What is his relationship to the lake? Painters, we're all just trying to figure stuff out, trying to get it down, that feeling, that light. And in the end, we’re all in conversation with each other, riffing on the same old themes, each in our own strange, imperfect way.