Anna 1989

Avigdor Arikha made “Anna” with oil on canvas: a figure reclined on a maroon sofa, limbs akimbo. Look how the artist applied the paint, building a surface that’s both thick and thin, with the brushstrokes dragging across the weave of the canvas. It's easy to imagine the physical act of painting – the pushing and pulling, the building up, and the wiping away. The artist seems to have felt his way around the figure, tracing the contours of Anna’s body, using the color to model the form. And that arm reaching up? I feel like he put that in as a kind of dare to himself! I can imagine Arikha talking with other figurative painters, like Lucian Freud, about the challenges of painting the body. About how to make the familiar strange, how to capture a likeness without sacrificing the liveliness of the paint. It's like they were egging each other on, in a way, pushing the boundaries of representation. Painting is like that – one big conversation across time, where artists borrow, steal, and riff off each other's ideas, and it’s up to us to look and listen.