Portrait of James Baldwin 1957

Beauford Delaney painted this portrait of James Baldwin with oil on canvas. The colours have a life of their own, they seem to vibrate off the canvas, the strokes are thick and juicy, the whole thing has an energy that's just infectious. You can almost feel the way Delaney was working, building up layer after layer of paint. Look at the way he's rendered the trousers, a riot of colour and pattern that somehow manages to capture the man's essence without being overly literal. The paint is so thick here, you can imagine the way he’s used the brush to load it onto the canvas, not trying to conceal the brushstrokes, but letting them sing. Delaney’s work reminds me a bit of Van Gogh, that same willingness to let the paint do the talking, to embrace the materiality of the medium. And like all great art, it invites us to see the world in a new way, to find beauty in the unexpected, and to celebrate the messy, complicated business of being human.