Portrait of engineer B.J.Zanis 1915

Zygmunt Waliszewski made this portrait of engineer B.J.Zanis with pencil on paper, and what a sensitive drawing it is. The thing that gets me here is the tenderness of the marks as they define the sitter's profile, and the beautiful, wispy lines that delineate the hair. You can really feel the artist working here, making small adjustments, going back and forth with the pencil, trying to capture something essential about the engineer's character. I know that feeling! It’s like you’re trying to solve a puzzle, but the puzzle is a person. And it is like a dance between the artist and the subject. The texture of the paper, the smudging of the pencil – it all adds to this feeling of intimacy and immediacy. It makes me think of other artists, like Lucian Freud, who are also so good at capturing the human form with such honesty and vulnerability. This drawing reminds us that art is always a conversation, across time and space, and that artists are always learning from one another.