Has Caught a Cold 1953

Tetyana Yablonska’s painting captures a girl in bed, maybe from the 1950s, when she was working in the then Soviet Union. The textures of the paint make you think about the soft feel of bed sheets and the heavy feeling of being sick. The girl's face is painted with such care, but the rest of the scene seems to be brushed in quickly. I wonder if Yablonska was trying to capture that feeling of being half-there when you're ill. The sadness in the child's eyes and the way she's caring for her doll makes you think about how art can catch those little, quiet moments of life. It reminds me a bit of other artists I admire, like Alice Neel, who also found beauty in the everyday and the human. Making this painting must have felt intimate. The way Yablonska used paint to show feeling connects us to a long line of painters figuring out how to show what it means to be human.