Alex Gluckman

My concentration examines the ways people experience art on emotional, spiritual, and intellectual levels. The people I draw have unique and personal interactions with art. But, the shared experience of connecting with art, regardless of its meaning and style, unites them. Appreciating art is a shared experience that cuts across time, culture, age, gender, race and religion. As art gives us windows into different worlds and times, it motivates us to seek understanding of different circumstances.

Looking at art has always made me happy. When I was young, my parents would often take me on walks along Museum Mile. We’d spend hours strolling through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Frick. The appreciation for art that my parents instilled in me at a young age became the inspiration for my concentration.

With charcoal, I draw people of diverse backgrounds as they look at a wide range of artwork, both contemporary and earlier works. To fully capture the significance of each piece of art, I pay close attention to its details as well as the frame in which it sits. I chose to draw in black and white so to keep the focus solely on the subjects. Looking through my concentration, you will see that each piece has a different story behind it.

1. My Art teacher, Mr. Cice, closely examines a portrait of an older woman named Mrs. Goodhue, one of the founders of Hackley School.
2. A woman wearing a hat studies the brushstrokes of John Singer Sargent’s painting Madame Édouard Pailleron Heron at the Met.
3. An older woman scrutinizes the composition of Piet Mondrian’s abstract modernist paintings.
4. An orthodox Jewish woman draws John Singer Sargent’s painting Albert de Belleroche on her iPad.
5. Two students discuss Claude Monet’s painting Vetheuil in Summer at the Met’s impressionist exhibit.
6. A Hackley Art student thinks deeply about Kazimir Malevich’s abstract geometric paintings with her sketchbook in hand.
7. A Hackley Art student looks over to her classmates after taking a photo of an abstract landscape painting at a small gallery in Chelsea, New York.
8. A woman and her elderly father pass by a portrait John Singer Sargent painted of his teacher, Carolus-Duran, as she guides him through a museum.
9. A young woman listening to the Met’s Audio Guide stops at a 19th century portrait to learn more about its history.