Bust of a Young Woman 1913

This is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Bust of a Young Woman,” date unknown, made with oil on canvas; a flurry of brushstrokes working together. When I look at this piece, I think about process. You can tell Renoir didn’t just load up his brush with one color and call it a day, he's mixing and mingling. Up close, you can see the strokes that make up her face. Rosy cheeks flushed with quick, staccato marks. The brushwork is pretty loose and free, and the colors blend into each other, giving her an ethereal glow. The color palette is really working for me here! The background melts into the figure, it reminds me of the way Manet sometimes works with a figure occupying the same pictorial space as the rest of the painting, so the figure doesn’t really “pop” the way it might in another painting. It's all part of the same world, like a painting-soup! Art is never really done, but it does stop, and this one feels like it stopped at just the right time.