This is in some way a tribute to the Italian civilians, the women who found incredible strength to carry on in their occupied country, without their menfolk, not knowing their fate, their crops destroyed, their animals taken, living in freezing conditions without even firewood to burn once the front line had passed them by.
For now, the painting is finished. I know I'll come back to it, but this is enough. Propped on my easel it keeps pulling me back, not to paint it but to read it. That's what a painting should do.
5 comments:
It's beautiful, mum!
Your limited palette has a strong voice. Ann
burnt siena, veridian, cobalt blue and ultramarine, yellow ochre and a touch of alizerin crimson.
Some neutral tint added to the darks because the paper was weird and absorbed pigments in strange ways.
A cross section of the paper under a microscope would be interesting to see how the different colours were pulled down into the fibre.
Lovely. I remember a series done by a NZ artist (I think it was Robyn Kahukiwa), who worked with archived photos of Maori women taken about the turn of the previous century. There were no names or identifying details on any of the photographs, just the faces of these women, their identities lost to time.
The artist recreated a photographic portrait in paint, in black and white, in the background of a canvas. In the foreground of each, in colour, she painted a colour portrait of a woman, as she imagined a modern descendant of the woman in the photograph might look.
I think it was a way of connecting the lost ancestors to their descendents, perhaps even with the very slim possibility that a present-day woman might recognise herself in the images.
Your work reminds me of this series, because of the poignant focus on unidentified, real-life subjects, keeping their histories alive.
I was infatuated with Robyn in fifth and sixth form.
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