Self-Portrait 1907

Harald Giersing made this self-portrait with oil on canvas, and when you look closely you can really imagine him dabbing the paint on, shifting and adjusting. What I love is how the painting really captures a sense of inquiry. You can almost feel Giersing thinking: what is my face really like? How can I translate this image into paint? It’s so humanizing. I love the quick, broken brushstrokes of blues, greens, and pinks, and how they work together to build the face and the background. It’s interesting to think about the materiality here. How paint can be layered and manipulated to create texture and depth. Look at the eyes, like dark pools, and then the pink touches on the cheeks. I feel like Giersing is working within a lineage of painters thinking about impressionism and expressionism at the time. I see painting as this ongoing conversation across time, it’s artists bouncing ideas off each other and developing new ways of seeing.