Viola player

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on December 2, 2022 at 11:41am

Curator’s Comments:

I remember liking the focused intensity captured in the Viola Player some time ago, when I first encountered the drawing on the site.  The piece resurfaced recently, and I was treated to another viewing of the portrait, which beautifully joins gestural movement in the figure’s hands with more robustly developed tonal values in the head.  The linear path of the musical stand interrupts the picture plane in a surprising way, framing the musician and providing a visual counterbalance to the right side of the composition.  I read this work as having a dynamic tension between representational figuration and abstraction. As an example, the curling lines behind the subject connect to the charcoal shadows, and can be interpreted as the figure’s trailing hair, or the music winding around him.