Acrylic on Canvas | 24×30 inches | 2018 | Divine Feminine
She is looking directly at you.
This is the first thing you notice and the thing you cannot stop noticing — those pale blue eyes, steady and unblinking, carrying the particular quality of a child's gaze that has not yet learned to look away, to soften its attention, to make the person being looked at more comfortable. She sees you completely. She is not performing anything for your benefit. She is simply there, in that yellow world, looking at you with the full force of a consciousness that has not yet been taught to diminish itself.
And yet.
Between her face and her hands — between the self that is seen and the self that acts in the world — there is nothing. The middle section of her body dissolves into the yellow ground from which she emerges, as though the paint itself made a decision to leave something unresolved, unsaid, deliberately and permanently open. The yellow seeps in where a torso should be, where a heart should be, where the core of a person lives. Her head is present. Her hands are present — those small, composed, slightly too-still hands that sit in her lap with the careful arrangement of a child who has been told to sit properly for a photograph. But between them, the question.
What is missing? What was always missing? What disappeared so gradually that neither she nor anyone watching noticed until the painting was already made and the absence was already there, permanent and irreversible and strangely, hauntingly beautiful?
The vintage photograph origin is everything here — because this is what vintage photographs of children do, if you look at them long enough. They show you the face and the hands and the Sunday dress and the careful arrangement of the body for the camera, and they withhold the interior completely. We know nothing of what this child thought or felt or feared or wanted. We know only that she sat still when she was asked to, that she looked at the camera when she was told to, that she composed herself into the image that was required of her.
And then the painting looked back at the photograph and said — yes. But what if we made the withholding visible? What if we painted the absence instead of pretending it isn't there? What if the parts of her that were never shown, never seen, never included in the official record of her existence — what if we simply let those parts be the yellow ground, the paint that reclaims its own surface, the honest admission that we never had the whole of her anyway?
The yellow is not innocent — it is the yellow of caution tape and fever dreams and the particular quality of light in a room where something has happened or is about to. It vibrates around her with an energy that is too large and too electric for the small contained figure at its centre — as though she is the still point of a force field she herself cannot quite see.
She is looking directly at you. The question is whether you are looking back with the same honesty she is offering.
✦ Original, one-of-a-kind painting ✦ Acrylic on canvas ✦ 24 × 30 inches ✦ Created 2018 ✦ Part of the Divine Feminine series ✦ Free worldwide shipping
She kept the face. She kept the hands. The rest — the painting decided.
Acrylic on Canvas | 24×30 inches | 2018 | Divine Feminine
She is looking directly at you.
This is the first thing you notice and the thing you cannot stop noticing — those pale blue eyes, steady and unblinking, carrying the particular quality of a child's gaze that has not yet learned to look away, to soften its attention, to make the person being looked at more comfortable. She sees you completely. She is not performing anything for your benefit. She is simply there, in that yellow world, looking at you with the full force of a consciousness that has not yet been taught to diminish itself.
And yet.
Between her face and her hands — between the self that is seen and the self that acts in the world — there is nothing. The middle section of her body dissolves into the yellow ground from which she emerges, as though the paint itself made a decision to leave something unresolved, unsaid, deliberately and permanently open. The yellow seeps in where a torso should be, where a heart should be, where the core of a person lives. Her head is present. Her hands are present — those small, composed, slightly too-still hands that sit in her lap with the careful arrangement of a child who has been told to sit properly for a photograph. But between them, the question.
What is missing? What was always missing? What disappeared so gradually that neither she nor anyone watching noticed until the painting was already made and the absence was already there, permanent and irreversible and strangely, hauntingly beautiful?
The vintage photograph origin is everything here — because this is what vintage photographs of children do, if you look at them long enough. They show you the face and the hands and the Sunday dress and the careful arrangement of the body for the camera, and they withhold the interior completely. We know nothing of what this child thought or felt or feared or wanted. We know only that she sat still when she was asked to, that she looked at the camera when she was told to, that she composed herself into the image that was required of her.
And then the painting looked back at the photograph and said — yes. But what if we made the withholding visible? What if we painted the absence instead of pretending it isn't there? What if the parts of her that were never shown, never seen, never included in the official record of her existence — what if we simply let those parts be the yellow ground, the paint that reclaims its own surface, the honest admission that we never had the whole of her anyway?
The yellow is not innocent — it is the yellow of caution tape and fever dreams and the particular quality of light in a room where something has happened or is about to. It vibrates around her with an energy that is too large and too electric for the small contained figure at its centre — as though she is the still point of a force field she herself cannot quite see.
She is looking directly at you. The question is whether you are looking back with the same honesty she is offering.
✦ Original, one-of-a-kind painting ✦ Acrylic on canvas ✦ 24 × 30 inches ✦ Created 2018 ✦ Part of the Divine Feminine series ✦ Free worldwide shipping
She kept the face. She kept the hands. The rest — the painting decided.
