The Hand and the Machine

Through the 1980s and 90s, on the harbors of the Croatian and Greek coasts, strangers sat for him twenty minutes at a time. Charcoal and soft pastel on Canson paper, the evening light going, a small crowd gathering behind the easel.

A face gives up its likeness in the first five minutes. The rest of the sitting goes to what the face is hiding. That was the actual work, and he did it thousands of times, one stranger after another, until reading people became something his hand did on its own.

When the harbors emptied, he turned to the other thing he was good at. The early PC era rewarded people who could hold an entire system in their head, and it turned out a portraitist could. He spent the decades that followed in information technology, building and running systems while the machines kept learning.

He was good at that too. That is the whole story of Act II.

His daughter grew up beside the easel. She watched people sit down as strangers and stand up holding a version of themselves they had not met before. She became a surgeon, and then she built Soulink, a platform that does in language what he did in charcoal: it finds what a person cannot quite say about themselves.

She asked him to run the company behind it. He said yes. The first face he ever drew for free was hers.