Unfinished portrait. Dad 2007

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this portrait of his Dad with pencil on paper. You can see the paper peeking through the drawing, a warm tan color, acting as a kind of ground. I love unfinished drawings, you know? There’s a real tenderness here. He must have loved his dad. Look how carefully he’s rendered the eye, the weight of the brow, the curve of the nose. And the ear is just a quick swirl, a gesture. I wonder if Krupa struggled with it and then decided to leave it, you know? It makes me think about all the portraits I’ve started and never finished. Maybe it's not about completion, but about the act of looking, of trying to capture something essential about another person. It’s like a dance, you know, a conversation. These little marks accumulate, each one a question, a response. And when you stop, it’s not because you’ve found all the answers, but because the conversation has reached a natural pause.