Woman Sleeping 1995

This is Lucian Freud’s 'Woman Sleeping', a drawing made with a pen, sometime in the 20th century, I would guess. Look at the way Freud builds up the form of the woman with a mass of tiny, precise marks. There's a real sense of process here, as if the image emerges slowly, accumulating like a sculpture. You can almost feel his hand moving across the page, carefully mapping the contours of her body. The physicality of the medium is palpable. It’s not about hiding the labor, but embracing it. Freud reminds me a bit of Van Gogh, not in style, but in that commitment to honesty, that desire to capture something raw and real. Art, after all, is an ongoing conversation, a constant exchange of ideas across time. And, like sleep itself, art embraces ambiguity and multiple interpretations over fixed meanings.