Sigmund Freud 2018

This is Gazmend Freitag’s pencil drawing of Sigmund Freud made in 2018. The first thing you notice is the smoulder in Freud’s eyes, his lips pursed as if he’s just about to drop some truth bomb on you. You can almost feel the scratch of the pencil on the page, the artist building up the image line by line, like layers of thought. I imagine Freitag, the artist, really getting into Freud’s head, trying to capture something of his intensity. It feels like the lines are searching, feeling their way around the contours of his face, those deep furrows and that heavy brow. There’s a raw honesty to it, like a psychoanalytic session laid bare. It reminds me that every drawing, every painting, is a conversation between artists across time, each one riffing off the other, trying to figure out what it means to be human. It’s all just one big, messy, beautiful dialogue.