Submarine

Submarine
From the Lost Drawings Series by Peter Bogdanov
Graphite and ink on textured sketch paper
There’s no water in “Submarine,” but the weight of pressure is everywhere.
Drawn during Peter Bogdanov’s early art school years, this surreal composition merges machine and emotion into a single vessel. The submarine, squat and staring, rests like a sleeping sea creature—part invention, part hallucination. Its rounded form, rendered in graphite and ink, is nearly cartoonish at first glance—but linger, and the darkness creeps in.
Windows become eyes. Pipes become veins. A small hatch suggests escape, or maybe entrapment. It's unclear whether the vessel is resting or wrecked, above the sea or deep beneath it. That ambiguity is the point. “Submarine” becomes less a machine of war or exploration and more a metaphor for the mind: self-contained, pressurized, peering out at a world it may no longer reach.
This piece, drawn during a period when Bogdanov was experimenting with symbolism and subconscious imagery, offers an early glimpse into the tension that would later define much of his mature work—between the internal and external, function and feeling. It’s playful and haunting in equal measure.
Like many in the Lost Drawings series, the original was destroyed in the 2024 hurricanes that swept away decades of the artist’s private archive. What remains is this preserved digital scan—an echo from below, a memory surfacing just in time.
To collect “Submarine” is to hold a vessel of quiet pressure—a machine built not for travel, but for reflection. It is a map of containment, of curiosity, and of the strange beauty found in sinking deeper.