Portrait of Anna Akhmatova 1922

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin created this oil painting of Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet, sometime in the earlier half of the 20th century. What strikes me is the process of building the face - the shades of pink and brown are built up slowly, almost like a watercolour, which gives it a certain luminosity. Look at the layering of colour in her left cheek. It's like he's not just painting a face, but building a monument to her presence. There's something both very direct and very gentle in the way he portrays her. It reminds me a little of some of the portraits of women by Picasso, where you feel like you're seeing both the inside and outside of the person at the same time. It makes you think about how painting can be about embracing ambiguity, about seeing more than one thing at once.