Udkast til salen på Liselund 1930 - 1933

This is a pencil sketch made by Joakim Skovgaard, titled 'Udkast til salen på Liselund'. You can see it now at the SMK in Copenhagen. Looking at this pale underdrawing, I imagine Skovgaard searching for the right forms and figures. He must have been thinking a lot about pictorial space and how to fit all those people into it. I can almost see him making the marks, squinting his eyes, stepping back from the paper, and then leaning in again. I love this tentative quality, the feeling of a thing coming into being. It reminds me of other preparatory sketches by painters like Poussin and Degas, who were also working through ideas, testing different arrangements. Ultimately, I believe all artists are in dialogue with one another, learning and experimenting, even across centuries.