A Face from Georgia 1974

Ivan Albright made this small panel painting called A Face from Georgia. The lack of date makes it hard to know when he made it, but it feels like a study, an exercise in what paint can do. Albright’s got this incredible sense of detail, focusing on the texture of the face, those deep lines, and wrinkles. He’s not trying to pretty anything up, or hide the wear and tear of life. The colors are earthy, almost muddy, but there's a vibrancy too, a kind of raw energy. Look at the way he’s built up the surface, with layers of paint, creating a topography of the skin, you can see his marks all over. This reminds me a bit of Lucien Freud’s later portraits, in the way that both artists are unflinching, almost brutal, in their depictions of the human form. The whole piece becomes a meditation on aging, on the body as a landscape marked by time. It’s not necessarily about beauty in the traditional sense, but it’s deeply, compellingly human.