Faces - Triptych [left half] 1961

Aubrey Schwartz made this print, Faces - Triptych [left half], and it looks like they were really going for a direct kind of expression. The marks are raw, like the artist was wrestling with the image, trying to pull it out of the paper. Look at how the dark ring around the face is made of all these individual strokes, almost like the face is emerging from a cloud of energy. You can almost feel the pressure of the artist's hand, the way they dug into the surface to create that depth. It's like they're saying something about the process of seeing, how we piece together a face from fragments, from light and shadow. It reminds me a little of some of the ghostly portraits by Alberto Giacometti, you know, how he would keep reworking and reworking the image until it was almost dissolving before your eyes. Like Giacometti, Schwartz reminds us that a portrait is never just a likeness, it's a record of a struggle, a dance between the artist and their subject.