Portrait of a woman in pink 1918

Hélène Guinepied painted this portrait of a woman in pink with oil on canvas sometime around 1918. It’s so clearly a painting, you know? The way the brushstrokes sit right there on the surface. Look at the face, see how the colors shift? Yellows, pinks, grays, blues. The paint is thin, not trying to hide itself, confident in its looseness. Her world of greens and blues in the background feels both like a real place and an imagined one. Those mountain lines, so clearly drawn. I’m thinking about the way Alice Neel also found the painting in a person. And how both artists seem to know that a painting is not about capturing a likeness, it’s about creating a presence. It's like they’re both having a conversation with painting itself.