Skitse af trane 1900 - 1905

Niels Larsen Stevns sketched this crane with graphite on paper, and you can find it at the SMK in Copenhagen. It looks like a page torn straight from the artist’s notebook. I love how immediate and intimate sketches are; they capture a directness, a thought in progress. There’s something quite vulnerable about the unfinished quality here. I can just imagine him, quickly trying to capture the essence of the crane; the way its feathers fall and how it is poised in a particular way. It’s as though he’s trying to translate the bird's very being onto the page. It reminds me that the act of drawing is such an embodied experience, a conversation between the eye, hand, and the subject observed. We are lucky to witness the artist’s own process of seeing, thinking, and feeling in the world. Isn’t that what it is all about?