Camel Driver 

Reuven Rubin made this drawing of a camel driver using ink and watercolor. It’s a quickly rendered image, but the loose washes of color and frantic pen strokes give the work a feeling of great energy. The image’s appeal lies in this dynamism. Consider the contrast with the scene itself: a man struggling to raise a camel from the ground. Camels, of course, are beasts of burden. They are participants in a system of labor. It’s a system the artist clearly knew something about. Rubin was born in Romania but emigrated to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1912. He later served in the British Army during World War I. We can imagine that he knew the value of hard work, but also the difficulty of extracting it from living creatures. The beauty of Rubin’s drawing lies in the way he connects this everyday reality to a broader artistic practice, proving that there's really no boundary between fine art and the realities of life.