Scottish-Canadian Soldier 1940

Augustus John painted this Scottish-Canadian Soldier with oil on canvas, and what gets me is how he seems to almost sculpt the face out of the paint. The colors are muted, mostly browns and grays, but there's a real physicality to it. You can see the strokes, how he built up the form with thick daubs, especially around the mustache and hat. It's not about hiding the process but revealing it, letting the materiality of the paint do some of the talking. There’s a kind of honesty in that approach. I'm reminded a little of some of Lucien Freud's portraits, in the way John captures a certain psychological intensity through the sheer weight of the paint. There’s a vulnerability in this soldier’s gaze, but John doesn’t give us easy answers, just this solid, tangible presence. In art, sometimes the questions are more interesting than the answers anyway, right?