Fecteau 1915

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin made this painting, Fecteau, with oil on canvas. You can really see the hand of the artist here, can’t you? The brushstrokes are loose, and not too blended, so you get a sense of the process, the artist thinking, and rethinking as he goes. I’m drawn to how the face is rendered in fleshy reds and browns, with stark blacks for the eyes, giving the subject a startling directness. Around the face, cooler tones and loose lines sketch in the background, but they don’t quite resolve into a definite space. This contrast makes the child's face feel very present. You can see a similar approach in some of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s portraits, where the subject seems to emerge from the canvas with an almost sculptural presence. Ultimately, it’s this tension between abstraction and representation, the solid and the ephemeral, that makes the painting so compelling.