A pastel painting of extraordinary chromatic complexity — the most fully painterly and the most coloristically ambitious work in the collection after the self-portrait. The composition is built from dozens of overlapping color zones: cerulean and cobalt blues dominate the upper field, giving way to lime green, yellow, magenta, purple, orange, and pink zones that build an all-over color field. Within this field a figure or face is embedded — at the center-left, a pale face-like form emerges from the surrounding color zones, the eyes briefly indicated, the hair dark around the pale face. The lower portion of the composition contains large abstract color masses — deep purple, gray-brown, pink.
The pastel medium here is used very differently from the chalk drawings (sanguine, green, blue chalk) that have constituted the other pastel works in the collection. Those chalk drawings used the pastel as a line medium — the chalk marking the paper with strokes. Here the pastel is used as a paint medium — the color applied as fields and areas, the chalk worked into the paper's surface to build color zones rather than lines. This is painting with chalk, not drawing.
The figure embedded in the color field — the pale face-form at the composition's center — connects this abstract work to the portrait tradition while departing from it completely. The face is not drawn but suggested, its presence the result of a pale area surrounded by colored ones rather than of specific marks defining features. This reversal — the figure as absence rather than presence, defined by what surrounds it rather than by its own marks — is the abstract portrait's defining formal strategy.