Portrait 1960

Vilen Barsky made this portrait with watercolor, and what grabs me is the confident messiness of the brushwork, and how the black ink bleeds into the blue ground. I imagine Barsky starting with a light blue wash, letting it dry just a bit, and then coming in with those decisive black lines to find the face. There's a sense of searching here, like he's feeling his way through the features. I can imagine him squinting, tilting his head, and letting the brush dance across the page, kind of like improvisational jazz. It reminds me of some of Picasso's ink drawings, where he's distilling a face down to its most essential forms. Look at the mustache—it's not about realism, but more about capturing the essence of a mustache, that little statement of character sitting right there on the face. Painting, in moments like this, becomes a translation of seeing into feeling. You get the sense that Barsky is not just portraying a person, but also exploring the very act of seeing itself.