Portrait of Y.E. Kustodieva 1925

Boris Kustodiev made this drawing of Y.E. Kustodieva with charcoal, blending and hatching to conjure soft volumes out of thin air. Look at how Kustodiev coaxes the likeness of a human being out of a blank page! You get the feeling that he’s really looking, intensely, trying to find something, to capture something about this person. In his marks there is a sensitivity. I see how the artist searches the face of his sitter, turning it this way and that to find the perfect angle. These tonal gradations make the drawing so alive. It’s not just a flat image; it's a record of his touch, of his searching gaze, of his hand moving across the page. It reminds me of the way painters influence each other across time, exchanging ideas like a secret language. Each artwork is not just a single, isolated thing, but part of a bigger web of seeing and thinking.