Portrait of Mrs Kountse 1909

George Bouzianis made this Portrait of Mrs Kountse with watercolour and ink. Look closely at the way the colours are bleeding into one another, the brown of the hair dissolving into the blue shadow behind her head. It gives you the sense that the painting wasn’t so much created as emerged, as if out of the artist’s memory. There's a real sense of immediacy here, as if Bouzianis was trying to capture not just a likeness but a feeling. The dark, almost gothic quality reminds me of some of the more experimental portraitists of the early 20th century, like Christian Schad. But where Schad was all precision, Bouzianis is all fluidity, he shares with him the search for the inner life of the subject. I love the way Bouzianis lets the materials do their thing, surrendering a bit of control and inviting the unexpected.