Self Portrait 1911

Kazimir Malevich made this self-portrait with oil on canvas, and well, it's a trip! Look at how he's mapped his face, not with realistic color, but with patches of oranges, reds, blues, and even some greens. It’s like he’s feeling out the structure of his own head, one brushstroke at a time. The surface has a real energy to it, the paint is applied with visible brushstrokes, like he’s building a puzzle out of color. He's broken the conventions of traditional portraiture and seems to be asking, 'What is a face, really?'. You can see that the marks around the mouth are almost moss-like. And how does that make you feel? It gives me a sense of how much painting can be a search, a kind of groping in the dark for something new. I think of other artists who were pushing boundaries like this, maybe someone like Kirchner, and how they all helped to open up painting to new ways of seeing. It's like they were all in conversation, figuring things out together.