If I heard its subject softly breathing, I would hardly be surprised.Ī painting similar to this one – I find out much later that the girl in question is called Rosetta she lives in Naples, and was so determined not to be on the receiving end of pity she interviewed Saville at length before agreeing to sit for her – will star in the forthcoming retrospective of Saville's work at Modern Art Oxford, the artist's first solo show in a British public gallery. No superlative I can think of seems to do it justice. But this painting moves well beyond vibration. They will tell you, for instance, that a canvas seems almost to vibrate, such is its power. Art critics, anxious to emphasise the resonance or beauty of a particular work, have a tendency to exaggerate. She is sightless, and yet you feel, somehow, that she sees right into you. The trick of the painting, the reason it is so hard to pull one's gaze from it, lies with the way it captures its subject's extrasensory watchfulness. A portrait: a woman, her neck at a difficult angle, her head tipped back, her unseeing eyes a pair of cloudy marbles (I know without being told that the model who sat for this work is blind). Only then, out of the corner of my eye, I see it.
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