Sigmund Freud 2018

Gazmend Freitag made this drawing of Sigmund Freud with pencil on paper sometime around 2018, it looks like. See how the face emerges from a dense network of lines, almost like a topographical map? Freitag builds Freud's likeness not with smooth shading, but with a kind of energetic hatching. It's like he's mapping out the very contours of Freud's psyche. Look at the way the lines around the eyes are so much darker and more concentrated, giving him that intense, almost interrogative gaze. The texture here is all in the layering and direction of those pencil strokes. You can almost feel the artist’s hand moving across the paper, digging in to create shadows, lifting up for the highlights. Then there's the signature, scrawled in this red ink which feels kind of jarring against the monochrome of the drawing. It’s a really nice touch. This kind of raw, expressive mark-making reminds me a little of the drawings of Egon Schiele, where the lines are never just lines but also convey a sense of emotional urgency. In the end, it's the kind of drawing that invites us to look closer, to question what we see, and to find our own meaning in its depths.