Untitled
A splash of light… It is a monochrome photograph of a young black woman, so why did my mind latch on to a seventeenth century painting of an elderly, white, Dutch woman? Both faces are beautiful, both look away from the male artists who capture their images, both exude calmness and strength; but I’m obviously clutching at straws. One is a formal seated pose, part of a pair of paintings, the other a pore-close framing of a face, in nature. One is oil on canvas in a museum, the other pixels on my monitor… so why?
The beauty of older faces is sometimes celebrated in photography, but there are precious few seventeenth century oil paintings of young black women, I cannot think of any, so I’m unlikely to have seen anything that conflates them.
It is only that both have a bold splash of light on the nose; a squish of lead and linseed oil, or a cluster of #e9e9e9. In both the painting and the photograph, it draws me in. It makes us intimate. The sharpest focus, or the finest brushwork, that is used on their eyes and the curves of their lips; but it is the loose dappling of light on their noses that make them both real to me.
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