My name is Dan Byers and I'm the Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center

for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

And how do you know me?

From high school.

We are looking at a painting of a man who's staring into the middle distance.

His face is somewhat obscured by shadow and more so than his face, the first thing that I notice are his hands, which are well lit.

And there's an incredible light that falls on his fingers and articulates the way in which

the hands are held.

One hand is resting on a hip, and you get a sense of weight and pressure where the hand meets the hip.

And one hand is dangling in front of his torso holding a cigarette.

The man is wearing a tuxedo and it's painted in a really sort of stark and generalized way so you're

made very aware of the two colors of black and white and then just some gray as shadow

to give it dimension. It's a very simple image because they's just black and white and gray and brown

with some flesh tones in the face.

But there's no background really besides a sort of generalized white that's very brushy.

And then Wayne's coating or a door frame that's defined by brown paint.

And the arm that is resting on the hip disappears into a shadow

on the right side of the canvas,

and that shadow is almost an identical black as the shadow in the tuxedo.

So the body sort of disappears for an instant and then comes back where the hand meets the tuxedo. So the body sort of disappears for an instant

and then comes back where the hand meets the hip.

The band sort of looks past you, not at you.

...