Elusive Man with Beard, Mid-Century Oil PaintingTo me, there is something so right about this elusive portrait, painted by an artist unknown to me, but which I know dates to the 1960s or so. Thinly painted on what I believe is an unprimed linen panel board, it seems to me both about the materiality and constructed illusory nature of painting itself and also about the subject himself, doubly veiled in a sense by the painter's treatment, and by his great beard! Hovering in a sort of liminal space, it