In the autumn of 1904, Giersing started studying with Kristian Zahrtmann. But on top of the breach with his secret love in spring that year, he was met by yet another serious definitive loss, when his mother died aged only 47. Giersing's definitive artistic watershed followed a couple of years later, but the decisive change in himself had come before this, following the two personal catastrophes which underlined the philosophy of life he had formulated as his own: that as a human being he stood and had to stand alone. At the same time the losses intensified his need to find new sources of support and advice capable of guiding him towards the new painterly language he was seeking, a language which should be able to project both himself and the world in pictorial form.
At the Academy he had lived through a chapter in his own story about the modern artist with himself as the principal character. The untenable situation at the Academy had been replaced by harmony in his relationship with Zahrtmann. But only for a time. It turned out that the harmony was not so complete that the story could not develop further, for Zahrtmann might well be able to further personal development, but he could not give that development and its objectives a content and a name, for as an artist he was not an idol worthy of imitation. The students developed and fostered the image of the modern French artists as possessors of Knowledge who had to be studied and absorbed to achieve the great of objective: True Art.
Before French art came into the picture, Giersing took part in an exhibition of works rejected by the Royal Academy Exhibition at Charlottenborg, which was to confirm him in his view of himself as a member of the avant-garde of the day. The two pictures exhibited - one of them a portrait of his cousin, which he considered to be the best thing he had painted - were not such as to cause any outrage. One reviewer even referred to Giersing as an artist who could just as well have exhibited in the Academy.
Rejection by Charlottenborg was a valuable badge of proficiency that linked Giersing to a group of young artists with whom he was later to join as a result of the formation of the artists' associations Ung Dansk Kunst (Young Danish Art) in 1910 and Grønningen (The Greening) in 1915. However, to be noted in the press as someone rightly belonging in the Academy was close to a catastrophe, at any rate in an unflawed story of the radical artist, and it must have provoked certain speculations. If it had not been clear before, it was now evident that something else was needed if Giersing's life as an artist was to have a direction. The problem was simply that the painterly language did not come of its own accord. He who discovers himself, also discovers his form, he had written, but he could not imagine that he had found himself. The problem ought rather to be reformulated as: He who discovers his form, also discovers himself.
In summer 1905 he therefore made an effort to progress beyond the technically assured and pretty and closer to the "real thing", as he put it. He wanted to get beyond "prettiness". He painted a large elegiac garden with a cloaked figure standing with its back to the viewer, a figure with parallels among his symbolist drawings. The grandiose pictorial combination of Man and Nature, however intimately it could be presented, was meanwhile not something paintable for him, and he soon discarded the picture.
The nature motifs were within the well-known repertoire to which over the years he was to return time and time again: the interior of the forest, the country road, and the broad, spreading landscape. Nature as a motif very much as in the paintings of the Golden Age, in mood endowed with a certain Romantic quality and, as open-air painting, in the spirit of naturalism. The intention was to get beyond prettiness, and the means employed were a certain simplification of what was seen through a more improvised, impulsive use of the brush with broader brush or palette knife strokes. Stylistically, one could rather imprecisely talk of a sort of impressionism, but the mood in a picture of the sunset like that in the garden picture is rather more romantic, as it is in a poem from his visit in which he sees the sunset with "Glow and fire / and mighty sea of flames". The impression of a certain spontaneity in execution which is left by these pictures is not merely the result of the painting technique, but also the rough grounding which Giersing started to use in 1905, certainly quite deliberately, partly at least to prevent the finished picture from looking too pretty and carefully done.