Old Man Facing Left 1959

Anatoli Kaplan made this drawing of an old man with lithographic crayon, and just looking at it, I can feel the push and pull of his hand across the stone. Kaplan’s portrait is a study of texture, surface, and the pure physicality of mark-making. The man’s beard and hair are built up from a thick mass of short, jabbing strokes, and his skin is represented by a much softer, almost smudged application of the crayon. I can imagine Kaplan, deeply empathetic to this elder, building the portrait bit by bit, and stroke by stroke; the dark marks like small furrows in a field. I can almost hear the scratching sound of crayon on stone. The old man’s gaze is averted, and he’s facing left, as if contemplating something from his past. He is like Rembrandt's portraits. I imagine artists like Kaplan are in conversation with artists of the past. What matters in this work is not the specificity of his features, but the embodied expression, capturing his essence through layers of black marks.