Portrait of the Poet 1913

This is a portrait of a poet by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, scribbled in 1913 using what looks like ink or charcoal. I can almost see Petrov-Vodkin leaning in close, squinting, trying to capture the poet’s essence in a flurry of lines. It’s a raw, immediate kind of portraiture, not trying to be pretty, but honest. Look at the way he’s built up the shadows around the eyes and jawline with these tiny, nervous strokes. You can feel the energy of the artist, like he’s wrestling with the image, trying to pin it down on the page. I’m thinking about other artists who were doing something similar at the time, like maybe some of the German Expressionists, but Petrov-Vodkin has his own thing going on. It's the search rather than the capture that I enjoy the most here; it's like we are looking for something together and somehow never find it. But maybe the search *is* the something.