Self-Portrait 1938

Theodor Pallady made this self-portrait with watercolor in 1938, and you can almost see the light glinting off the wet page. It's fascinating to imagine Pallady in front of a mirror, brush in hand, trying to capture his own essence with such fluid strokes. You know, sometimes painting feels like trying to catch a fleeting thought, or a memory that’s just out of reach. The thin washes of brown and grey create a delicate, almost ghostly image. I wonder if he paused, considering how to render that glint in his eye, that shadow under his hat. It reminds me of the way Morandi would keep returning to the same bottles, trying to see them anew each time. And the hat! That dark shape becomes this mask, a way of hiding and revealing at the same time. He’s playing with the push and pull between presence and absence, what to show and what to conceal. We all do it in a self-portrait, right? It’s like we’re constantly in conversation with the artists who came before us.