Has Caught a Cold 1953

Tetyana Yablonska made this painting, 'Has Caught a Cold', with oil on canvas, and the way she's layered the paint makes me think about how we layer feelings. Look at the girl’s yellow shirt, how it seems to glow from within, built up of small, hatched strokes of paint. See how the brushwork loosens and thickens around her hands as she bandages her doll. The doll itself is a flurry of small, rapid marks, as if the artist didn’t want to resolve it too much, as if to say the doll’s identity lies in its fragmented and partial form. Isn't that just like us, always a work in progress? This makes me think of Lucian Freud, who also built up figures with palpable layers of paint, though with a very different emotional register. Ultimately, the beauty of painting lies in its capacity to hold multiple, even contradictory, truths.