Portrait of Julia 2000

Frank Auerbach made this, a drawing entitled 'Portrait of Julia', with charcoal, sometime recently. What I see here is a conversation between mark making and structure. Look at the face, formed from so many scribbled lines, built up and scraped away, it looks like Julia is emerging from a chaotic cloud. He’s trying to trap something fleeting in the web of lines and the process is what it’s all about. Notice how those lines extend down to the body. Then there are those thicker, bolder lines that form the shoulders. They almost look like an abstract shape, like a sign, or letter from an alphabet. With this approach Auerbach reminds me of Leon Kossoff, another London painter, also interested in the poetics of the everyday. Both of them teach us that art is a verb, a process, more than a noun, a thing.