Blotter Ink

Blotter Ink
From the Lost Drawings Series by Peter Bogdanov
Ink on sketch paper (early 1990s)
You don’t draw something like “Blotter Ink”. You summon it.
Created in the early 1990s, when Peter Bogdanov was riding the wave of his art school years and the post-punk energy of San Francisco’s underground, “Blotter Ink” feels less like a drawing and more like a visual trance—channeled in real time through a restless pen, guided more by instinct than plan.
Faces warp. Eyes float. Skulls drip like candle wax. Lines tighten and explode. The page is crowded but controlled—like a head full of too many thoughts, trying to spill out at once. You can feel the influence of psychedelia here, not in clichés, but in the loosening of boundaries: between structure and chaos, humor and menace, form and formlessness.
The title, “Blotter Ink,” is no accident. It nods to LSD blotter art, but also to the literal way ink bleeds into paper—how meaning emerges from the stain, not the stroke. The drawing looks like something made in a single, uninterrupted sitting, possibly late at night, possibly under the spell of music, memory, or something stranger.
This piece is one of Bogdanov’s rawest—a glimpse of an artist scribbling past the edge of discipline and into something unconscious. It’s part drawing, part purge. And it shows the early foundation of what would become his signature approach: fearless, layered, a little bit wild.
The original work was lost in the 2024 hurricane that destroyed Bogdanov’s Florida archive. Only this scan, rough and true, remained—a souvenir from the edge of a page and the edge of a state of mind.
To collect “Blotter Ink” is to hold a snapshot of chaos captured in ink. A sketchbook séance. A reminder that sometimes, the best ideas arrive when you’re not entirely in control.