Self-Portrait, en face I 1945

Helene Schjerfbeck painted this self-portrait with oil on canvas, and it feels like she was scraping away at something. The colors are muted – browns, grays, and a sickly pale green – as if the painting is fading before our eyes. I imagine Schjerfbeck standing in front of the mirror, her face a battleground of lines and planes. Each stroke feels like a question: Who am I? What do I see when I look at myself? There's a raw honesty here. The paint is thin in places, thick in others, like she's building up layers of experience, then sanding them back down to the bone. I’m reminded of other painters like Paula Modersohn-Becker who also laid bare their inner lives on canvas. Painting is like a conversation across time, each artist picking up where the last one left off, trying to make sense of this messy, beautiful, and heartbreaking thing called being human.