Portrait of Olga Petrova 1922

Rolf Armstrong rendered this portrait of Olga Petrova with pastel on paper. The strokes are soft and smudged, but it doesn’t hide the process of making the art, you know? There’s a real freeness about the way Armstrong moves the pastel across the paper, giving a sense of form but also allowing the colors to mingle, creating a kind of soft-focus effect. The ochre-colored background is a grounding element, but even that has these visible strokes of color, the marks of someone at work. And there's something interesting in the juxtaposition of the face, with its careful modelling of light and shadow, and the more chaotic treatment of the hair where there’s this explosion of color, like a party happening up there. I see echoes of someone like Man Ray in the way Armstrong plays with light and shadow, using it to create an atmosphere of glamour and mystery. It leaves a real open space to think about beauty and artifice, doesn’t it?