Alice Neel - Randall in Extremis

Alice Neel - Randall in Extremis, 1960
oil on canvas

One of the important American portraitists of the twentieth century, Alice Neel painted friends, family, lovers, artists, political activists, and failed people, folks excluded from the mainstream, living on the edge. She approached them with an uncanny blend of lucidity and sympathy and knew how to discover their inner landscape and how to render it on their faces.

This Randall is fully clothed while we have the sensation of seeing him naked (or rather he seems to fear that we see him naked). Is he horrified by us? Or rather by some interior demon who shatters him and brings the guy to the level of insanity? Trying to control this demon, to keep it hidden from us, and realizing that he just cannot, any more?

(Paint Made Flesh)