Bellerophon Taming Pegasus c. 1964

Jacques Lipchitz made this drawing of Bellerophon Taming Pegasus using white and black chalk on brown paper. Look at that confident network of lines, how they tangle and separate to form figures from classical mythology! I can imagine Lipchitz’s hand moving across the page, searching, feeling for the contours of these forms as they emerge. There is a beautiful tension in this drawing, between the dark ground and the contrasting chalk lines dancing on top. The white chalk almost seems to lift Bellerophon and Pegasus off the page, giving them a kind of weightlessness, a sense of flight. The more assertive black chalk suggests an undercurrent of struggle, of taming and being tamed. It reminds me that making art is itself a kind of taming, a wrestling with form and feeling. Lipchitz’s sculptural language reduced to chalk is so raw, immediate. The act of drawing becomes a way of thinking, a conversation across time.