A three-quarter portrait of a young child or early adolescent — the face bowed forward, the chin toward the chest, the eyes closed or downcast, the expression entirely absorbed and withdrawn. The round face and small features read as pre-teen: the cheeks full, the nose small, the jaw not yet set. The hair is cut in a short bob with a fringe, the strands described with bold strokes at the left temple. A buttoned collar is visible at the lower center, the garment formal or school-like. The ink is applied with the same bold, thick line as the surrounding adult portraits, giving the child's face the same graphic authority as the more characterized adult faces.
The bowed head — the chin toward the chest, the gaze entirely absent — is the most extreme forward-bow in the portrait series. The child's face is presented fully to the viewer in terms of its position, but entirely unavailable in terms of its expression: the eyes down, the face closed, the person somewhere inward. This combination of formal accessibility and psychological withdrawal gives the portrait an unusual emotional texture — the viewer can see the face completely but cannot reach the face's person.
The child portrait is rare in the ink portrait series: most subjects are adults, the faces settled and characterized. Here the unsettled softness of a young face, drawn with the same bold ink as the adults, creates a quality of incongruity between the medium's authority and the subject's youth. Among all the portraits in the new portfolio — from the pregnant figure to the man with glasses to the headscarf woman — this child's bowed face carries a specific kind of pathos: innocence enclosed, the self turned inward before it has fully formed.