Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita made this pencil drawing of a figure's legs, a hat, and a head in profile, sometime before he died in 1944. The quickness of the marks really grabs me; you can see the artist thinking on the page. The legs are just a few lines, but they totally read as legs! It’s like he's saying, "Here's the essence of leg-ness." It's kind of funny and profound at the same time. And then there's the hat, this big, almost cartoonish shape. It reminds me a bit of Picasso, how he could distill a form down to its most basic elements. The materiality is so simple, just pencil on paper, but the effect is complex. I wonder if de Mesquita was looking at other artists, maybe simplifying and abstracting like they were? Art's just one big conversation. We all chime in! The date scrawled on the bottom right corner, almost like a nervous tic.