Portrait De Simone En Veste Rouge 1986

Hélène de Beauvoir gives us Simone in a red jacket, using oil paint and a touch of yellow to light up the background. Imagine the studio, the smell of oil paint, the concentration it takes to capture a likeness, but also to bring a painting to life. I love how the strokes of red are both the jacket and the feeling of the jacket. It's thick in some places, thin in others, like a map of feeling. The white trim glows. Maybe Hélène was thinking about the way light hits fabric, or maybe she was thinking about Simone's intellect as she holds the paper and that is why the white is so luminous. Who knows what an artist is really thinking? Painters have always painted other painters, or their friends at least. It’s all one big conversation, each stroke answering another from across time. We look and add our own thoughts to the mix. It’s never really finished, is it?