Woman At the Chest 1919

Pierre-Auguste Renoir made this oil painting, *Woman At the Chest*, and well, it’s all about the paint, isn’t it? See how the colors just blend and breathe into each other, like they’re not really separate things at all. It’s all about process, the way one mark leads to another, the doing of it all. The way the reddish hues of her hair bleed into the peach of her skin, it feels, I don’t know, really intimate. It’s like he’s not just painting a woman, but he’s painting the feeling of warmth, of closeness. And the way he leaves parts kind of unfinished, or maybe just lets the brushstrokes be really visible, reminds us that this is a painting, a made thing. There’s a kind of honesty in that. Renoir always reminds me of Fragonard, it's that French way of embracing looseness and ambiguity, where the painting is a conversation, not a declaration.