Katsonarock (Portrait of V.X.) 1941

Hedda Sterne made this portrait with what looks like pastels or crayons, rendering the subject in powdery browns and oranges. I like the way the image seems to be caught mid-creation. It’s like the drawing is emerging from the paper, or dissolving back into it. The top cat has this angular, Egyptian-style formality. It’s been shaded carefully to give it volume. Then there’s the lower cat, rendered with softer edges. The whole surface has this beautiful chalky texture; you can imagine the artist rubbing and blending the pastels with her fingers, the colour sinking into the fibers of the paper. Look at how the lower section of the image dissolves into delicate white marks. These feel almost like erasures, or ghostly traces. I love this quality of things coming into being, then fading away again. It reminds me a little of the way Philip Guston worked, with his messy, unresolved forms, as if the painting was always in process.