Self-Portrait 1947

Ilka Gedo made this self-portrait with dark ink on a creamy ground. She’s wearing a hat, and I’m guessing it was made with a scratchy nib, the kind that splatters if you press too hard. I feel for Ilka as she worked on this. I wonder what she was thinking? Maybe she was stuck inside on a grey day, staring into the mirror. She must have used a nervous energy to make marks that look like rain, scribbling with a fury to create tone and shadow. The hatching is a physical record of her seeing. It’s so direct, and somehow, it gives you a sense of how the artist felt when she made it. That line extending from her neck might have been a mistake, or maybe she knew that one day it would invite another artist to think about the unpredictable life of a line and how that can generate new ideas. That’s how it is with art, one person’s practice builds upon another’s.