Untitled portrait by Mary Alice Kelly.
The self-portraits of Mary Alice Kelly [Kingsport, Tenn.], as unselfconscious and unflattering as they are, stress the dignity of the individual; they feature a marvelously nervous line that describes her facial features while also resisting losing its identity as a line.
In this way, by not being completely absorbed into the form it depicts, her line imparts a certain struggle to the artistic act of depiction that becomes a metaphor for the individual's personal struggle with existence.
