Lori 1953

Martiros Sarian made this drawing of Lori with graphite, and it's all about capturing the drama of this rugged landscape. You can see this incredible density of marks, and the repetition of vertical lines. I can imagine Sarian out there on location, squinting in the sun, trying to translate the volume of these mountains into marks on paper. Drawing is so immediate, right? It’s like thinking with your hand. There's a rawness to the strokes. The sharp lines give a kind of brittle feeling of the rock face. Look at the top right, how the marks are scribbled and loose. Then down below they are much straighter and confident. It’s almost architectural in the way it's built up. Drawing allows for ambiguity and uncertainty. It's like a conversation between the artist and the landscape, isn’t it? The marks becoming a record of that exchange. Sarian's work feels like a connection to a long line of artists who have tried to capture the beauty and the complexity of the natural world.