Waiting 1982

Francesco Clemente made this watercolour, called Waiting, with such tender washes of colour. It's like he's letting the medium do its thing, isn't it? The skin glows with a pink hue, fading into the yellow of the torso, and all this is set against a constellation of indigo circles. You can almost feel the water seeping into the paper, the way the pigment bleeds and settles. Look closely at the eyes – one dark, one light, each defined with simple black lines. This directness gives the whole thing such an emotional punch. It's weird, but those eyes also remind me of Philip Guston's late work. There's a kind of humility in this approach, an openness to chance. It's this embrace of ambiguity that I find so compelling. Like with Cy Twombly, it seems to me that the making of the painting is a way of waiting.