Portrait of Miss Ruth Breslin 1925

George Luks made this oil on canvas portrait of Miss Ruth Breslin in 1925, but its like, is it finished? There's a real freedom in Luks’ brushstrokes and colour choices, a kind of making-it-up-as-he-goes along spirit. Look at the way the paint is dragged across the canvas in these short marks, he’s letting the materiality of the paint – the way it blobs, the way it sits – really sing. The mark making isn't obscured. There’s a dialogue happening, between the brown and black tones in the figure’s dress and the dark background, that makes the figure really sit forward. My eye keeps going to the dark mark just beneath the child’s left hand, which is both a shadow and also kind of sculptural, it suggests form while also flattening the space. It’s that tension between flatness and depth that gives the piece its zing. Painters like Luks and Manet always make me think of each other, in the way that they embrace paint's own inherent ambiguity and provisionality, like painting is a conversation rather than an end point.