In 1906 Giersing had painted motifs from Funen which he could have found in many other parts of Denmark, and if Fritz Syberg at the wedding in November 1917 had not given his daughter a small thatched cottage he owned at Svanninge in the south of Funen, Giersing would presumably never have thought of going there to paint country roads and churchyards.
About 40 oil paintings are known from the seven summers spent in Svanninge from 1919 to 1925. Compared with what Giersing had produced at Sorø and Furesø, where the weather was just as capricious as on Funen, this was only a modest production. The formats and the speed of execution were as usual, so the reason for the low productivity must presumably be sought in the many distractions he found in Svanninge.
From an artistic point of view, moving into an area that was the domain of Giersing's father-in-law and the other painters known as the Funen Artists was not without its problems. But Giersing's starting point was radically different from that of the locals. He came and saw things as a town-dweller on holiday, just as he had done at Mogenstrup or Sorø or near Furesø. He almost demonstratively avoided references to the rural population and rural culture in general.
In his first summer he painted a picture of the road rising or falling from the foreground into the picture, flanked by trees, telegraph poles and the expanses of meadow, which were to be the most constant elements in his work from Svanninge.
On the canvas, the visual impression of the roads near Svanninge and Fåborg combines with a string of models including, in addition to Cézanne, Hobbema's Allé, Danish Golden Age landscapes and L.A. Ring. Through the form and substance of the painting what is seen is transformed into monumental pictorial architecture - that is to say resembling monumental pictorial architecture. The architecture of the picture becomes some-thing that can be seen as a landscape in which everything appears simplified, as surface against surface, arranged almost without transition in simple rhythms of light on dark and dark on light in the sharply drawn construction where the pictorial elements are in the nature of set pieces. The landscape presents itself - or Giersing quite consciously presents it - as a constructed picture though not as pure structure, but also as picture and atmosphere - the atmosphere of the countryside as also expressed in a few lush green and elegiac landscapes without roads.
In summer 1920 Giersing found a new motif to which, as in the case of the country road, he was to return on a dozen or so occasions during the following years: the churchyard near Svanninge Church. From an artistic point of view its elevated position, which decoratively obviously allows the trees to be outlined clearly against the sky, must presumably have appealed to him. Even in his first attempts he approached the motif with a naturalness that must have presupposed that he knew what he wanted to do. If the season, that is to say the summer, is perhaps not symbolically congenial to the subject, the saturated green, the grey and the black against the white are nevertheless of a melancholy mood which is in harmony with the bleak nature of the motif, which is accompanied by the broad sweeping movement in the silhouetted vegetation.
Whereas in his country roads Giersing excludes living culture and cultivates or arranges nature, the opposite applies to the churchyard pictures where he creates life and disorder in what is ordered. In other words, what is too alive is overcome by order and rigidity, while what is too ordered and ultimatively rigid, death and the stones, is overcome by circumventing this order and rigidity. Two different ways, perhaps, of mastering life and death.