Peter's Bored

Peter’s Bored
From the Lost Drawings Series by Peter Bogdanov
Graphite on sketch pad paper (early 1990s, art school figure drawing class)
Every art student has that moment—the model’s holding the pose, the room’s too quiet, and your brain starts wandering faster than your pencil. For Peter Bogdanov, boredom never meant inactivity. It meant drawing something else.
“Peter’s Bored” is exactly what it sounds like: a sketch born from a restless young artist in his early 20s, sitting through yet another figure drawing class, and letting his imagination off the leash. Instead of dutifully rendering the model, Peter turned sideways and scribbled this peculiar, off-kilter character into the margins of the moment. It’s loose, strange, and undeniably alive.
The figure—slouched, slack-jawed, and full of “I’d-rather-be-anywhere-else” energy—looks like the visual equivalent of a sigh. It’s not trying to impress. It’s trying to stay awake. But there’s charm in that honesty. Humor in the posture. And just enough weirdness to prove the artist’s hand was still sharp, even if his mind was miles away.
This is what makes “Peter’s Bored” special: it captures the in-between space of creativity—where the rules fall away and instinct takes over. It’s not polished. It’s not profound. But it’s real. And real is what art school was often about.
Like many pieces from this era, the original was lost in the 2024 Florida hurricanes that destroyed Bogdanov’s early archive. A scan, made casually and kept by chance, survived to remind us that even boredom has its brilliance.
To collect “Peter’s Bored” is to own a moment of rebellion by pencil—a sketch that proves sometimes, the best art happens when you stop trying so hard.