Zelfportret 1999 nr. 41 1999

Philip Akkerman made this self-portrait number 41 in 1999, and I imagine he used colored pencil or maybe sanguine chalk? There's something so compelling about this repeated attempt to capture one's own likeness, especially with these soft, smudgy marks. You can see the building up of tone, the way he layers the color to create depth and volume. Look at the hatching around the jawline, the way the marks follow the form, almost like a topographical map. The way the whole face is rendered in these curving lines, you get a sense of the skull beneath the skin, a reminder of the fragility of the human form. It reminds me a bit of some of those gnarly self-portraits by Rembrandt, but with a slightly more playful, almost cartoonish edge. Like Akkerman is winking at the viewer, acknowledging the absurdity of trying to capture the self in a single image. Art is a conversation across time, a dialogue between artists wrestling with similar questions, grappling with the mysteries of existence.