Academic Hambartsumian Portrait 1977

Petros Malayan made this drawing, Academic Hambartsumian Portrait, in 1977, and it now lives in the National Gallery of Armenia. Look at the scratchy, restless marks, how the charcoal sits on the page. Malayan must have been working quickly, trying to catch something essential about Hambartsumian’s presence. Those deep, dark strokes, they’re not just describing a face, they’re chasing after an idea, a feeling. I imagine the artist circling, stepping back, squinting, then lunging forward to make another mark. The way the light catches on the glasses, the determined set of the jaw, the furrowed brow – it's like Malayan is not just showing us what Hambartsumian looked like but hinting at the weight of thought, the burden of knowledge. There’s a nervous energy to the drawing, a kind of searching, like the artist is trying to understand something about his subject, and maybe about himself, through the act of drawing. It reminds me that every mark we make is a record of our looking, our thinking, our feeling.