Portrait of the Artist and His Mother 1926 - 1936

Arshile Gorky made this drawing, *Portrait of the Artist and His Mother*, with pencil, and you can see all the preparatory grid lines. It’s like he's mapping out a territory, staking a claim. I love seeing those pencil marks, because, for me, art is as much about the process as it is about the final image. There's something really tender and tentative about the way he's captured his mother’s face, like he's trying to hold onto a memory. And the texture of the paper, it’s almost like skin, it gives the work a real sense of vulnerability. The dark smudge of what looks like spilled blood near his mother's shoulder speaks to the pain and trauma that shaped his life and work. It’s like a ghost of something that can’t be erased. I'm reminded of Philip Guston’s later work, that same raw emotionality. For both of them, painting was this act of bearing witness. You get the sense that art is always in dialogue with itself, these conversations across time.