Keti Berisha 2012

Gazmend Freitag painted this portrait of Keti Berisha, and I can imagine him trying to capture something essential. It's like he’s asking himself: how do you put a person onto canvas? Look at how the background kind of dissolves into soft green and blue hues. You can see it’s been built up with layers of color and thin strokes. Freitag lets the paint do its thing, mingling and blurring, making the background less defined and more dreamy. I wonder what he thought while he was working on her face? There’s a real tenderness there, a kind of searching. The way he’s handled the hair, those strokes of red and brown dancing down the canvas, it’s like he’s trying to catch the light, the energy, the very essence of life itself. Artists are always wrestling with the same questions, trying to figure out how to make feeling visible, and I think Freitag is right there with them.