Potatoes 1989

Avigdor Arikha made this pastel drawing, Potatoes, and right away, you see that he’s interested in the stuff of the world. It looks like he’s just trying to work out what the potato is made of. The drawing has this great earthy palette, and the marks are laid down very deliberately. It reminds me a bit of Philip Guston, who I love, because of the way he could find the extraordinary in the ordinary. There’s no attempt here to hide the process. You can really see the layering of marks, the build-up of color and the way the pastel is dragged across the surface. The bottom left corner is especially interesting. It almost dissolves into abstraction, but then you see that dark mark near the bottom, and it just clicks back into being a potato again. Art is so funny! It's always keeping you guessing.