Ornamentik, skitse af kors 1864 - 1941

This is a page from a sketchbook by Niels Larsen Stevns, a flurry of ideas captured with graphite on paper. You can almost feel the artist’s hand moving quickly, trying to keep up with the speed of thought. The textures here are subtle but telling. Look closely, and you’ll see how the tooth of the paper grabs the graphite, creating a slightly rough surface that contrasts with the smooth, fluid lines of the text. The drawing is immediate, the cross shape sketched out tentatively. It reminds me of Cy Twombly’s notebooks, a similar sense of process and exploration, or maybe even some of the more frenetic pages of Philip Guston’s sketchbooks, where the artist is working through ideas in a raw, unfiltered way. What’s great about these kinds of sketches is that they embrace the incomplete. They invite us to participate in the artist’s thinking, to imagine where these ideas might lead.