The unfinished portrait (Lilian) 1998

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this drawing of Lilian, in 1998, with pencil on paper. You can see the tooth of the paper, the pressure of the marks... the artist has really gone to town with the shading to describe the contours of her face. I'm thinking about his decision to leave this portrait unfinished, and what that reveals about the artistic process itself. Maybe he felt he had captured something essential, an elusive likeness that further work might ruin. The limited color palette and the softness of the pencil strokes give the portrait a gentle, almost melancholic feel. See the way he’s handled the hair, it's so full of life and volume. What was he thinking when he made that mark there on the lip? Maybe like me, he's grappling with the push and pull between representation and abstraction, the desire to capture reality and the freedom to distort and invent. It’s a conversation that painters have been having for centuries.