Fever Head

Comment

Comment by Michael Hecht on January 26, 2022 at 9:28am

Kristen, 

Thank you for your insightful thoughts on my painting.  It is gratifying to know that you connect with my work!

Comment by Resident Curator on January 24, 2022 at 3:34pm

Curator’s Comments:

I was happy to discover your more recent work on the site. I never tire of viewing your paintings, and find each one wrought with psychological tension and beauty. Fever Head is particularly intense, with its close-up depiction of pain or sickness.  The fleshy color palette and texture extends into the background space, scumbled and abraded in an echo of the subject’s agonized face.  I find the reddish eyes to be particularly effective in capturing the physical restriction of light in a fevered state. The pure black and red spots are in pronounced contrast to the figural subtlety, and yet provide a formal balance of compositional weight and visual interest.  They are a primal representation of what ills us; incalculable and amorphous around the edges.  I can’t quite decipher what’s happening at the bottom of the painting. The man’s cropped hand on the right appears to pull material across his chest.  In the context of the global pandemic, I can read it as the vestige of a mask, just removed.  As with all of your work, I’m struck with how the specificity of portraiture, (particularly self-portraiture), taps into a universal understanding of the challenged human condition.