Seated Male Nude (recto); Seated Woman with a Dark Blouse (verso) 1908

Umberto Boccioni made this drawing, *Seated Male Nude*, with a pencil on paper. It's all about line, a sketch, really. Look how the lines are searching for the form, they remind me of Giacometti, all tentative and fragile. The body seems to emerge from the paper, not quite solid, but full of potential. You can almost feel him figuring things out as he goes, changing the angle of a shoulder, adjusting the curve of a back. I love that sense of process, the way the drawing reveals its own making. See the concentrated energy in the upper arm, it almost feels like a build-up of pressure, a kind of visual tension, and I guess that tension animates the whole thing. This drawing has so much to say about seeing as a kind of exploration, more questions than answers, and in this way it feels like a conversation.