Girl from Taiwan 1933

Fujishima Takeji painted 'Girl from Taiwan' sometime between 1885 and 1943 with a flurry of expressive brushstrokes and restrained color. The canvas, a playground for intuition, reveals more about the artist’s eye than the sitter herself. Notice how the blue-grey seeps and stains around the edges of her face. The artist is working from observation, but then veering off, adding and subtracting detail, letting the painting find its own language. I imagine him, brush in hand, now sure, now hesitant, feeling his way through each stroke, improvising and responding, building up the face in layers of color. Her gaze is so direct, and the rouge on her cheeks gives her a certain boldness. Those hands are so lightly sketched, as if she is about to disappear, like a dream. You can see the artist really thinking through the painting and bringing so many different influences to bear, from French Impressionism to Japanese printmaking. Artists like Fujishima are always in conversation, absorbing the past while inventing the future.