Portret van een onbekende vrouw, mogelijk Irene With-Sauer 1930 - 1955

This portrait of an unknown woman, possibly Irene With-Sauer, was made by an anonymous artist. Look at this image, it is not a painting, but it feels like one somehow, right? There’s a kind of soft focus that I see in my own work – a way of working and reworking that makes the image blurry, out of time, somehow. The greyscale of the photograph, almost painterly, it feels less like documenting an actual person and more like an emotion or an idea of a person. The texture of the image is very important, you can see that every little detail is brought to the forefront. The eyes, for instance, are very visible, they are a deep, dark tone in contrast to the rest of the image. It feels like an intimate moment, you see her like she is seeing you. There’s a kind of Agnes Martin thing going on, the idea that art isn’t about representation but about feeling.