Portrait of a man 1919

This portrait of a man by George Bouzianis is all soft brushstrokes and muted tones that blend, blur, and smudge the subject’s features. I imagine the canvas propped up in a dim studio, the air thick with the smell of oil paint. Bouzianis must have worked with deliberation, each layer building depth and character, but notice how the paint isn’t overworked. It’s wet-on-wet painting, alla prima, and some of the canvas shimmers through. Look at the sitter’s hands, softly clasped: that grey-blue is echoed across the background, unifying the painting into a single field of vision, a unified atmosphere. You can see his concentration not only in his face but in how he's rendered the details of his clothing. He invites us to see the world as he did, as if he were looking through a melancholic lens. We can find echoes of Manet here, and maybe some hints of early Picasso too. It's the mark of an artist thinking through the possibilities of the medium and in doing so, speaking to all the artists gone before him.