Pale Woman with Red Hair 1912

Alexej von Jawlensky made this painting with oil paint, and I can almost feel the painting being built up layer by layer. I imagine Jawlensky, leaning in close, making decisions about each stroke of the brush. There's this tension between control and letting go – the bright red hair explodes with energy, while the green and yellow face has an otherworldly calm. The paint is thick, juicy, and you can practically see the marks he made as he coaxed the colors into being. It's like he's having a conversation with himself, trying to capture something essential about this woman. That confident black line, that bold stroke defining the nose—it’s like a shorthand, a way of capturing the essence of a face without getting bogged down in details. I feel like I’ve seen this face before, in a dream maybe, or in another painting by another artist grappling with the mysteries of the human form. We all learn from one another, don't we? We are all in an ongoing conversation. Painting is a form of embodied expression.