Something Missing

Something Missing
From the Lost Drawings Series by Peter Bogdanov
Graphite on toned vellum (early 1990s, UCSF Anatomy Lab)
There are drawings that show what’s there.
And then there are drawings that show what’s not.
“Something Missing” was created during one of Peter Bogdanov’s deeply formative visits to the UCSF Anatomy Lab—a rare privilege extended to only a handful of art students. In that space, surrounded by preserved human remains and the reverence of medical inquiry, Bogdanov learned to draw not just what he saw, but what had been taken away.
The subject here is a partial figure, likely a cadaver, exposed from shoulder to hip. But what strikes first is what’s absent—the head, the limbs, the identifying features. The form is quiet and clinical, but also deeply human. The torso, delicately shaded in graphite, is at once anatomical and ghostlike. Every muscle, every cavity, is rendered with care, but the silence in the empty spaces is what lingers.
This is not gore. This is grief as structure.
The drawing meditates on presence through absence. A body no longer whole. A story that ends mid-sentence. In that sterile room, with pencil in hand, Bogdanov confronted the body not as a model—but as a vessel. A mystery. A memory.
Originally part of his private collection, the piece was lost in the 2024 hurricanes that destroyed Bogdanov’s Florida home and studio. Thankfully, a high-resolution scan—made long before the storm—survives to speak in its place.
To collect “Something Missing” is to honor what isn’t there. It’s an image of the body stripped down, not just by scalpel, but by time—and seen through the quiet, respectful gaze of a young artist learning to draw what we all eventually leave behind.