Portrait of Donna 2017

Aaron Nagel painted this portrait of Donna in 2017, and what strikes me first is the way he uses muted tones to create a sense of depth and quiet contemplation. It feels like a really considered process. The material qualities of this piece are quite something - there’s a beautiful tension between the highly rendered face and the more gestural, almost unfinished quality of the dress and background. Look at the way the paint thins out around the shoulders, almost like the figure is emerging from the darkness. It reminds me of some of those old master paintings, where the background kind of dissolves. Nagel's work makes me think of Lucian Freud, in the sense of capturing a certain raw vulnerability of the sitter. But there's also a contemporary sensibility here, a kind of ambiguity that invites us to bring our own emotional experience to the work. It’s this space for interpretation that makes art so endlessly fascinating.