Czóbel Béla Women 1946 1964

Bela Czobel painted this canvas of a woman in 1946 with oil on canvas. You can see that Czobel wasn’t aiming for a smooth, blended finish, right? Instead, he’s all about these visible, kind of chunky brushstrokes – like he’s building up the image layer by layer. It’s really neat when you get up close, you can see how the colors aren't just flat. There's this dance between the earthy tones and then these pops of brighter hues that just vibrate against each other. The red-orange of her vest, there is a kind of urgency to it, which then sinks into the cooler greens and blues around it, it's like the colours are having a conversation. Looking at that area of brushstrokes around the neck is like reading the artist’s thought process! It puts me in mind of someone like Paula Modersohn-Becker, in the way she captured something so solid yet so fleeting. Ultimately, it all comes back to the surface, to that act of applying paint, and letting the colors breathe.