Can't Sleep

Can’t Sleep
From the Lost Drawings Series by Peter Bogdanov
Graphite and ink wash on textured paper
Restless, raw, and deeply human, “Can’t Sleep” captures the familiar torment of a sleepless night with a stark intimacy that lingers. Drawn in graphite with subtle ink washes on textured paper during Peter Bogdanov’s early art school years, this piece feels like a visual diary entry—unfiltered, private, and quietly unguarded.
The figure curls inward, body folding in on itself in a futile search for comfort. The lines are expressive, almost agitated, with shading that feels less like rendering and more like emotional weather—smudges of thought, fogs of worry. There’s no pillow in sight, no peace—only the hum of anxiety and the weight of thoughts that refuse to quiet down. It’s not just a drawing of insomnia. It’s a portrait of the inner life under pressure.
Bogdanov’s early experimentation with ink wash gives the composition a dreamlike haze, emphasizing the blurring between thought and body, between restlessness and reflection. Created decades before disaster would strike his studio, the original was tragically lost in the 2024 hurricanes that destroyed his home and most of his physical archive. This digital reproduction is all that remains—a rescued ghost of a moment many will recognize but few could depict with such restraint and poignancy.
To collect “Can’t Sleep” is to own a fragment of an artist’s honest evolution—a study not only in figure and mood, but in the quiet chaos of being awake when the world isn’t.