Lasgush Poradeci 2016

Gazmend Freitag made this portrait of Lasgush Poradeci with pencil on paper, in 2016. It's amazing how much character Freitag coaxes out of simple graphite. It looks like he started with a basic structure, then built up the values using layers of hatching. Look at how the lines around the eyes and mouth capture the weight of the skin, the subtle droop that comes with age. I love the way he hasn't overworked it; you can still see the white of the paper coming through. There's a particularly confident patch of hatching under the tie, those freely drawn lines add definition without trying to hard. For me the image has a similar quality to some of Lucian Freud's portrait etchings, in the way that it manages to be both unflinching and intimate. Art is this ongoing conversation, each artist building on the work of those who came before. Each mark is a thought, a feeling, a question.