Girl Sleeping 1943

Paul Wieghardt made this drawing, 'Girl Sleeping', with pencil on paper. It's all lines, a quick and light touch, a barely-there image. You can feel Wieghardt circling the image, searching for it, and, at any moment, he might have given up. It's an image that threatens to disappear, like a dream slipping away as you wake. I can imagine him thinking, 'where is she, let me draw her into being'. Maybe he did it from memory, maybe from life. It's hard to tell. What did he want to capture? Was it the intimacy of seeing someone asleep, or was he exploring the way the body relaxes, letting go, surrendering to gravity? Artists are always trying to work out how to see, how to make something appear on the paper or canvas, to coax an image into being. And each one teaches the next one something about how to do that. Wieghardt shows us a method, a sensitivity.