Woman with Dark Hair 1918

Henri Matisse made this painting of a woman with dark hair using oil paints, but we don't know exactly when. I'm really drawn to the way Matisse builds up this face with simple shapes and blocks of color, letting the ochres and browns blend together, kind of earthy but also luminous. It’s like he’s trying to capture the essence of a person, not just what they look like. You can really see the brushstrokes here, they’re not hidden at all. Look at the way he’s painted the eyes, just these dark almond shapes, but somehow they still manage to be so expressive. There's a raw quality to the work, like it's a sketch, but it feels really resolved. Matisse really inspires a lot of artists to embrace the simple things in life, and find ways to make them extraordinary through colour, line, and form. It reminds me of work by Milton Avery, who also used simple shapes and bold colours to capture the essence of a subject. Both artists remind us that painting can be a conversation, about seeing and feeling, more than showing.