Portrait of an old man 1916

Aleksandr Deyneka made this portrait of an old man in 1926, with graphite pencil on paper. Look at those graphite lines! A blizzard of marks, a constellation of cross-hatching conjuring this old man’s face. You can see Deyneka working here, feeling his way into form and likeness. The paper becomes a site of inquiry, a place for him to think through drawing. See the ghostly face sketched in the bottom right corner? He might have been thinking about the old man’s mortality, or maybe he was trying to resolve an anatomical problem. That kind of searching feels so contemporary to me. It’s like he’s saying, "I'm going to keep working, keep looking, keep trying to figure it out." It's a very vulnerable thing to show, but it also makes the work so much more alive. That’s how artists converse across time, inspiring each other to create. It’s about embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, and allowing for multiple interpretations.