A Face in the Crowd

In 1885 the Belgian artist James Ensor began a series of six drawings of the life of Christ. He titled them The Aureoles of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light. With their erased and re-worked surfaces, these pieces are magnificent explorations of the endless possibilities of the medium. Two of them, The Lively and Radiant: The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem and The Rising: Christ Shown to the People, are enormous concoctions of black and brown crayon, watercolor...

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