The woman 2013

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this drawing of a woman with ink on paper. The thing that grabs me first is the push and pull between the very descriptive areas and the more abstract marks. It's like the drawing is caught between different ways of seeing. The marks are so physical; you can almost feel the artist’s hand moving across the page. There’s this tension, like he’s trying to capture something real, but also letting the ink do its own thing. Look at the way the ink pools and bleeds around the face, and how the mark making becomes more frenetic on the bottom left of the torso. These blobs of ink suggest a hidden density, a solidness to the form of the woman that contrasts with the delicacy of the lines elsewhere. I'm reminded of artists like Marlene Dumas, who use similar washes of ink to evoke the emotional complexity of their subjects. Like her, Krupa is more interested in capturing a feeling than an exact likeness. The beauty of art is that it can embrace these ambiguities, these multiple interpretations.