UCSF - Half Our Brain

UCSF – Half Our Brain
From the Lost Drawings Series by Peter Bogdanov
Graphite on archival sketch paper (early 1990s, UCSF Anatomy Lab)
What happens when you stare at half a brain long enough?
In “UCSF – Half Our Brain,” Peter Bogdanov does more than study anatomy—he records reverence. Created during a rare and solemn session inside the UCSF Anatomy Lab, this drawing captures one hemisphere of the human brain, separated cleanly, quietly resting as a subject of both science and mystery.
Rendered in delicate graphite, the folds and contours of the cortex are drawn with near-clinical precision, yet the linework retains the mark of a thinking, feeling hand. Bogdanov doesn’t simply diagram—he observes. He treats the exposed brain not as object but as origin. The birthplace of memory, motion, identity—now reduced to half its whole, and resting in front of him like a relic.
The title, “Half Our Brain,” is not just anatomical—it’s philosophical. It speaks to how much we can’t draw. How much of what made this brain think, dream, and suffer has already vanished. What’s left is form, and the artist’s responsibility to witness it.
This drawing, like others from his UCSF lab series, was tragically lost in the 2024 hurricanes that destroyed Bogdanov’s Florida archive. But a preserved high-resolution scan remained—enough to let this half of the story continue.
To collect “UCSF – Half Our Brain” is to hold a meditation on mortality, intelligence, and fragility. It is a portrait of the very thing that once imagined portraits. And it asks, without saying a word: What remains when thought itself is still?