Vegetable seller from Jaipur 1976

Mariam Aslamazian painted this canvas of a vegetable seller from Jaipur with oils, sometime in the mid to late 20th century. It's the way she makes those marks, the way she moves the paint around, you get the feeling that she was really present, you know, in that moment. There's something so tactile about the surface; the paint isn't too thick, but it has this body, a kind of juicy quality. Look at the buildings in the background, how they're not quite defined, just blocks of color suggesting form. And then you see that same approach echoed in the folds of the seller's sari, the way the purple melts into the ochre. Then there's the vegetables themselves in the foreground, look at the whites of the onions and their bright green tops. Aslamazian reminds me of Alice Neel in her commitment to painting the people and places around her with such clear-eyed honesty. I think art should always leave space for this kind of ambiguity.