Untitled 1986

Jonathan Lasker made this untitled drawing, and what’s so striking to me is the conversation between the controlled and the wild. The background's all these orderly stripes, right? Horizontal, vertical. Then, bam, these blobby, almost cartoonish shapes jump out. One's got this frantic, scribbled energy, like a caged animal trying to break free. Another is just a wobbly outline, floating and ambiguous. It’s all graphite on paper, so nothing fancy, materially. But the surface has this raw, immediate feel, like you’re right there with the artist figuring things out. I’m especially drawn to that scribbled blob; it looks like it's trying to contain something, maybe an emotion or an idea that refuses to be tamed. It's like a visual metaphor for the creative process itself, full of starts, stops, and messy breakthroughs. There's a kinship here with someone like Philip Guston, who embraced a similar kind of awkward, vulnerable mark-making. Ultimately, I think it’s a reminder that art doesn’t always have to be polished or perfect; sometimes the most interesting stuff happens in the rough edges.