When I look at this painting I am struck by Nora Heysen’s gaze. Look at how she stares directly towards us despite her head being slightly turned away. I can’t tell if she’s scrutinizing us, inquisitively watching us – or, perhaps, ready to paint us, as suggested by the paintbrush she is holding just above her palette, with her paints already mixed. There is definitely an element of tension, but also a sense of play.
Heysen was only 21 years old when she painted this self-portrait. As a daughter of a renowned landscape artist, Hans Heysen, she received her earliest artistic training at home. This left her with a particularly academic approach, which we can see from this work.
But this was not to last long. Soon after completing this painting, she broke away from her realist style, getting further into the feelings of what she was painting.
This painting also feels like it sits at the juncture of a personal transformation, too: like it’s a record of a woman getting to know herself. Her posture is assertive and yet she imbues the work with subtleties of tenderness, like her skirt and jumper (that on close inspection have the most extraordinary folds) so that we really feel what it would be like to have that fabric on our skin, or the breeze passing under the folds.
Heysen reveals more about her character through her fastidious attention to colour and detail. For instance, look closely and you’ll see the colours on her palette are the same as the those in the painting.
Heysen maintains her exactness in such minute ways that even those tiny dabs of red on her palette can be located in the painting, like in her lips and skin tone. And it is this level of care which gently tugs away at her slightly colder exterior, allowing us to see the 21 year old girl who is trying to find her artistic way in the world.
