Black Eyes (Les yeux noirs) 1913

Henri Matisse made this drawing, "Black Eyes", with ink on paper. It’s about as stripped down as you can get, right? A bare minimum of lines to conjure a whole person. I love how Matisse lets the paper breathe. The ink isn’t trying to fill every space or define every edge. It’s more like a suggestion, a dance between what's there and what our minds fill in. Take the hair, for example. Just a few strokes, but you get the sense of a whole curtain of it. Or the way the lines of the shoulders and chest simply fade away. Matisse was always chasing that feeling, trying to capture the essence of something with the fewest possible moves. You see that in his later cut-outs too. That’s the real conversation, isn’t it? How much can you take away and still leave something powerful?