Laughter. Self-portrait

On the left, a small grotesque figure with a distorted, open-mouthed face crouches on a ledge, its clawed hands clasped together and one bare foot in a single shoe. Behind and beside it, filling the right half of the sheet, looms the close-up face of an older bearded man with unruly curling hair, his eye turned toward the smaller figure.

Built up entirely from tiny stippled dots and fine crosshatched lines in black ink, the drawing has a dense, almost sculptural texture, with deep blacks around the hair and beard set against untouched white paper. The distorted anatomy and confrontational stare give the image a tense, unsettling, dreamlike charge.