Portrait of an Older Man 1913

Robert Falk painted this portrait of an older man, date unknown, with brushes loaded with pigment in a high key palette. I see that the blues and greens mix like sky and earth, all pulled together with that dab of bright yellow lemon! I can imagine Falk in front of his model, building up the forms with a kind of blocky shorthand. Look at how he’s described the hands, almost like landscapes of their own. What was he thinking as he laid down each stroke? Probably something about form and feeling, because in painting, they’re always tangled up together. I wonder if he ever struggled, just like me, to make the paint do what he wanted? It reminds me of other portraits by artists like Cezanne, who also tried to capture something essential about a person through paint. There's something timeless in these attempts – how painters work through their own language, their own time, to speak to each other, and to us.